Telekom Austria's subsidiary, A1 announced that it will be expanding its FTTB (Fiber-to-the-building) broadband access to more than 30,000 households in the city centre of Graz, the second-largest city in Austria after Vienna within the next twelve months. The rollout of FTTB-based network will be targeted at densely built-up urban multi-storey buildings.
"New technologies enable several hundred Mbit/s on copper lines with the support of FTTB, thanks to new technologies such as G.fast. Even large buildings are best suited for this technologies, " said Marcus Cruel, A1 CTO.
This will see A1's fiber-optic lines getting converted at the basement, which forms the transition to the existing wiring.
Early this year, the Operator partnered Alcatel-Lucent for the deployment of G.fast vectoring and Vplus access technologies. G.fast technology promises speeds up to 1Gbps over a distance of 500 meters on plain copper, while the VPlus is a DSL technology that allows operators to achieve aggregate speeds of 200 Mbps and more over copper at distances of up to 500 meters and 300 Mbps over distances shorter than 250 meters.
More recently, A1 announced that it is investing some 500 million euros in 2016 alone to extend Internet coverage in urban and rural areas, upgrading both its fixed broadband network and 4G/LTE networks.
