High-Speed Copper and Coaxial Broadband

The articles in this special section addresses copper technologies and deployment practices beyond those currently available. Legacy copper infrastructure originally designed to provide voice services (twisted pair network) or television services (coaxial network) has performed vastly beyond specification and continues to deliver increased broadband speeds. Today’s mature technologies like vectored VDSL2 and G.fast for twisted pair and DOCSIS 3.1 for coaxial networks, are able to surpass present-day demand for broadband speeds in excess of several hundreds Mb/s per end user. The ability to off er gigabit speeds has been fueled by advances in digital signal processing and by a steady migration toward fiber rich access networks where only the last “mile” into the homes remains copper based (FTTx). We often get the question why the industry continues to consider copper access, while fiber is perceived as superior in terms of transmission properties.