 So we're here at the ITU in Geneva and I'm very pleased to be joined by Frank van der Poetten who's a rapporteur on question 4 on broadband access over metallic conductors and this in the context of study group 15 on transport access and home. Frank welcome and thank you very much indeed for joining us here today. Thank you. So study group 15 is very well known for its DSL standards and it's also well known for you know breathing new life into copper access technologies through GFAST. It's also the 20th anniversary of question 4. Could you please provide our viewers with an overview, a history of study group 15 and question 4 and also you know why it was so successful. We started in 97 so 20 years ago indeed and so in the early days we were working on ADSL which was just the next step of voice band modems earlier work of the ITU and we were taking like the speed of services like to a few megabits per second. It took a few years to finalize this work but quickly we stepped up to VDSL and we spend our time on how can we like say make the speed times 10 and VDSL went into the several tens to 200 of megabits. We're still working on VDSL enhancements today. After VDSL we went into GFAST which is more recent so say most of our time we've spent on ADSL and VDSL in the very early days well basically there was nothing people were on voice band modems and but quickly there was ramp up in the marketplace. We clearly like found how to bring the internet to two millions of people like today we must be like approaching a billion people using the broadband services or the say the interface definitions as provided by the ITUT so we're very proud of our 20 years and what we have achieved and brought to the world. I'd also like to talk to you about your new GFAST standards. Could you please explain you know some of the key features of GFAST and what are some of the benefits towards both operators and consumers? So GFAST was conceived like to be next generation from VDSL so being in a shorter distance to the to the residents let's say increasing the data rates to like a gigabit. A gigabit was like say three four years ago that was like the magic number so magic numbers go up like every now and then and so we were thinking about how can we do this and so together with several deployment scenarios so operators broader contributions to the ITUT say well there is interest in something like this so please think about what can be done so it has taken us quite a while to get to a first version like say end of 2014 we brought something like one gig GFAST deployment we also have to think about how we were making it better than VDSL from the the sense of the robustness we're using wider spectrum having to work with the ITUR for the reasons of say interference into other services we've worked on several protocols improvements compared to VDSL but the first version is well it is a few years old so recently we've even been adding more improvements to this like taking it up to not only the twisted pairs but taking it to coax they can get into say 200 megahertz wide spectrum and so now we're at 2 gigabits per second speed so that's where we are now and how are industry players applying this standard and this technology in their new business models various deployment scenarios exist for GFAST like the first one that was really taking like we need something that we can put up in small boxes like up electricity poles or in manholes in the ground really in the scenario of something that enables fiber to the home but is just not yet fiber to the home there being too much too much being too much expensive for say digging front yards or drilling the walls of your house so bringing the fiber like say to the very close to the house that was the original target so we're talking like maybe gonna reach like 50 meters or a hundred meters max but even then that showed to be somewhat too expensive so the other scenario is then okay can we replace VDSL with GFAST at the cabinet then you need bigger boxes but also that was possible with GFAST so now we're going back to the original intent but slowly like doing higher speeds and all this but in the recent additions that we did to GFAST we also took coax into account in the sense that now we also address the use case of GFAST overlaying on the same coax in like MDU deployments with satellite distribution in apartment buildings so that's a new use case that we are addressing or have addressed in our very recent updates to the work and something new that we're looking into how we can address it is like backhaul and fronthaul in the context of mobile and wireline convergence and so there we need to look at what can we do how we can we improve to get into the low latency space and so that's ongoing work and so the fronthaul backhaul is yet another use case for GFAST and you know talking about speeds when GFAST was first released in 2014 people thought we'd maybe reached the theoretical limit if you will but just last year you proved everyone wrong and doubled the speed what can we expect in the years to come can we triple it co-druple it I don't know if you can make such a prediction but just to give an idea of the future direction of the group's work yeah when we started G.FAST including myself we thought shouldn't we call this G.FAST but we proved ourselves wrong including we proved myself wrong in that okay one gig was like a magic number four years ago now the magic number is 10 gig so we need to think about can we really do 10 gig on a copper wire or a coax or what even by doing higher frequencies or new technologies new possibilities really explore like a broad thinking exercise and so we started the new project that we named G.MG.FAST we set the the target for getting a recommendation out pretty far out in the sense that yeah we all understand that this is going to be new silicon for all the vendors and all this so we really need to think from scratch and but okay we got a start now we have learned over our 20 years that it takes like two three years to get anything from initial thoughts to to say availability of silicon so with with that experience we have to start thinking about this although we just really only started thinking about how we can do this so there is quite some work ahead but we're getting quite good input and contributions and all this so it seems like the thinking is ramping up and people are interested always interested of course to think about the next great thing but it's gonna be a while so for the deployments we really also have to focus on can we make G-FAST more deployable and better and so we have to keep working on the improvements of G-FAST and at the on the new technology at the same time so we're pretty busy still after 20 years in Q4 we're still not done answering the question how you do broadband on the teleconductors well I mean looking at your body of work it's clearly not G.LAST so it's G-FAST and getting faster and I look forward to seeing how much faster it can even get so Frank I'd like to thank you for your time and wish you a successful study group meeting thank you you're welcome thank you