German cable provider Kabel Deutschland has more than triple Virgin Media’s fastest broadband speed connection with a 4,700Mbps field test.
The record-breaking test was run on the same cable network recently upgraded to supply KD customer in the city of Schwerin with 100Mbps broadband.
Virgin’s fastest connection is currently a 1.5Gbps service being trialled with a handful of customers in the ‘Silicon Roundabout’ area near London’s Old Street.
Dr. Adrian v. Hammerstein, CEO of Kabel Deutschland, said: “The Schwerin field test demonstrates that the broadband cable network is already today a high-performance and sustainable infrastructure offering huge untapped potential.
“At the same time, it is the only broadband infrastructure in Germany that is able to provide these high bandwidths extensively.”
Kabel Deutschland connected together 12 Arris Touchstone CM820S cable modems to process the incoming data, but otherwise used the standard cable head-end and infrastructure as it does for 100Mbps services.
Sadly for German download fiends, it doesn’t look like KD is planning to roll out 4Gbps services to users, any more than it was planning to roll out 1.17Gbps in a similar field test in Hamburg, two years ago.
Lorenz Glatz, chief technology officer of Kabel Deutschland, said: “Using this speed, a DVD could theoretically be downloaded within eight seconds.
“Current standard laptops or modems cannot even process these high speeds. It will take many more years until users find online services and web content that need a download speed of up to 4.7Gbps.”
The KD network uses the same DOCSIS 3.0 standard as Virgin Media and the majority of European cable providers, and like Virgin combines fibre-optic lines to local cabinets with coaxial copper cables running the final tens or hundreds of metres to the customer.
Coaxial cables can cope with significantly higher data rates than the twisted pairs of copper wire used for fibre-to-the-cabinet broadband and the UK’s telephone infrastructure.
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