Huawei and Omantel will Deploy the First G.fast in the Middle East

Today, Huawei announced that Huawei will jointly deploy the first G.fast network in the Middle East with Omantel, a leading operator in Oman, at the ninth Huawei User Group Meeting. Huawei’s E2E G.fast solution boosts Omantel to construct ultra-broadban d networks efficiently by reusing existing copper lines.

Omantel is the first and leading integrated telecommunications services provider in Oman, which has abundant copper resources in its existing network. With the development of digital home services and high-definition video gradually becoming widely demanded by subscribers, Omantel wants to reconstruct its live networks to achieve broadband acceleration. It plans to cover 90% of home subscribers by 2020 in Muscat, the capital of Oman, and especially in high-value areas, even plans to provide 200 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s for high density buildings to provide users with higher bandwidth and better experience. Omantel wanted a solution that provided faster access, faster deployment, and yielded a faster return on investment.

Huawei proposed the E2E G.fast solution that employs optical line terminal (OLT), G.fast distributed point unit (DPU), and G.fast customer-premises equipment (CPE) to help Omantel meet its goals. The field test shows that G.fast is able to achieve 800 Mb/s and 400 Mb/s at loops of 100 m and 300 m, respectively. This reflects much greater performance than ADSL2+ and VDSL2. Omantel will be deploying G.fast in the basements of tall buildings, where the existing copper infrastructure, such as telephone lines, will be reused to deliver ultra-broadband access. This avoids the need for construction inside houses, which may involve drilling holes and open wiring, simplifying delivery, saving costs, and reducing customer complaints. Large-capacity G.fast sites can also serve up to 96 lines, which significantly reduces per-subscriber costs. Additionally, Omantel will deploy the high performance G.fast home gateway, which will bring subscribers improved experiences for voice, data, video services, and dual-band gigabit Wi-Fi services.

“G.fast technology brings copper access into the gigabit era by delivering fiber-like speeds, which makes it possible for us to improve the experiences for more customers faster over old copper lines and thus making the most of our existing copper network,” said Said bin Abdullah Al Ajmi, VP Operations at Omantel.

“We are looking forward to continuing the partnership with Omantel through the Commercial G.fast deployment. Huawei’s investment and innovation in the end-to-end large capacity G.fast solution will significantly help Omantel to accelerate the rollout of ultrafast broadband and achieve business success,” said Leo Hong, Huawei Oman CEO.

Copper is an important infrastructure for fixed network operators and G.fast technology unleashes the potential of copper, helping operators make the most of existing copper resources and speed up ultra-broadband network deployments. Huawei, as the leading fixed access network solution provider, is committed to providing the operators with future-oriented ultra broadband solutions. Huawei contributes a lot to the formulation of the G.fast standards. Moreover, after multi-year R&D investment and joint cooperation with top industry players, Huawei has also begun to release a series of G.fast products. These products support the industry’s largest service capacity, smart and secure reversed power over Ethernet (PoE), remote power supply (RPS) , as well as IP68 protecting. Till now, Huawei and more than 20 operators had carried out G.fast deployment and test. Also, it has been put into commercial deployment in counties such as UK, Switzerland, Germany, and Canada.