"It's fantastic," Alex Moulle-Berteaux, COO of Starry, tells me. Starry uses an innovative wireless-to-the-rooftop signal to bring bandwidth to an apartment building and then uses Positron G.hn to serve the individual units. (TNO performance graph at left and below)
Chano Gómez astonished the 2017 G.Fast conference with the claim G.hn could deliver similar bandwidth at half the cost and complexity. G.hn's much simpler interference cancellation brought the cost down. The retail price for G.hn Access Multipliers is $120-175 per port.
When Peter Benisti and Reg Weiser told me Positron's G.hn gear was selling well, I asked to hear from some customers. We were at an event about broadband for affordable housing. Two New York ISPs were using G.hn and were enthusiastic. "It works fine. It does the job," they told me.
Moulle-Berteaux is connecting 10's of thousands with wireless to the rooftop. He told me:
"It's fantastic for our use case. It can work on phone wire, cable coax, and just about anything else. We can rely on it.
Starry is now able to profitably serve buildings with as few as 10 units due to the low cost of reaching each apartment.
From Positron
About G.hn
The ITU-T G.9960 G.hn Wave-2 standard is designed to leverage the existing telephone, UTP, CAT-3 or CAT-5/5e wiring or RG-6/RG-59 coaxial cable to deliver a Gigabit Internet service to each subscriber without the complexity and delays associated with in-building fiber installation. G.hn is increasingly used as an Access Technology by Operators looking to simplify their access network and backend infrastructure with an Ethernet-like technology that is highly scalable without some of the inherent complexity of DSL-related technologies. With G.hn, Operators deliver advanced services such as Gigabit High Speed Residential Internet and 4K IPTV without the high capital and operational expenses associated with a fiber retrofit. Each G.hn subscriber port supports up to 1.7 Gbps of dynamically allocated bandwidth for near symmetrical Gigabit services over the existing telephone wire or coaxial cable. The Positron GAM solution is MEF CE 2.0 compliant and is ideally suited to deliver Business Ethernet services in an MDU and/or MTU deployment. G.hn Delivers Superior Bandwidth over Twisted Pair and Coaxial Wiring Infrastructures
G.hn consistently delivers superior bandwidth over twisted pair wire and coaxial cable.
G.hn dynamically adjusts the allocation of the bandwidth between the downstream and upstream direction to reflect the real-time traffic conditions for optimal and near-symmetrical performance under all conditions. When operating on twisted pair, G.hn can operate either on a single pair (SISO) or by bonding two (2) pairs on a single port (MIMO) to extend the reach of a Gigabit service to 250 meters. The results were obtained by the TNO Institute (Netherlands) on 24 AWG (0.51 mm) wiring.