Telekom Austria claims a new Alcatel-Lucent vectoring technology will enable it to wring every last bit of capacity from its current copper network, and so meet European broadband connectivity targets.

 

The firm’s domestic A1 subsidiary is set to be the first to deploy Alca-Lu’s noise-cancelling vectoring technology, which will initially be deployed on the operator’s GigaNetwork in the south of the country before a nationwide rollout in the back half of the year.

 

Telekom Austria is counting legacy infrastructure as a key part of its plans to achieve European Commission goals of covering all homes in the region with broadband by 2020. The operator claims the target can only be achieved if its networks can achieve minimum transmission speeds of 30Mbps.

 

“We are currently facing a dual challenge,” A1’s chief technical officer Walter Goldenits explains. “On the one hand, we have to invest in the further rollout of our high-performance fiber optic network going forward, and on the other we have to provide our customers with a full-coverage broadband network with ever-increasing bandwidths starting from today.”

 

Alca-Lu’s vectoring technology boosts data rates by minimizing cross-talk – or interference – between the parallel lines within a cable.

 

Goldenits says the untapped potential of existing copper lines “is incredibly impressive.” The firm’s GigaNetwork covered 50% of Austrian homes by end-2011.