Brazilian telco Oi intends to deploy G.fast technology in Rio de Janeiro in March, according to local news site Teletime. It is understood the project will be carried out in collaboration with French-US vendor Alcatel-Lucent. G.fast vectoring uses a wide frequency band to achieve very high speeds – more than 1Gbps according to the vendor – on copper lines over very short distances. Going forward, the two companies are expected to collaborate on XG.FAST trials; in October last year Alca-Lu, working alongside British incumbent BT, achieved peak throughput of 5.6Gbps using an XG.FAST configuration in a laboratory setting.
Running in parallel, the two companies are also working to improve Oi’s data transmission capacity by up to 57%, via a ‘restructuring’ of its 30,000km optical transport network (OTN).