Dubai: Telecom operator du is revamping its fixed-line home networks to offer speeds of one Gigabits per second (Gbps) within the next six to eight weeks, a top official said.
Gbps is a measure of bandwidth on a digital data transmission medium to transfer 1,000 megabits or 1,000,000,000 bits per second.
“We haven’t done much major launches in fixed home network area but, we had done a clean-up and revamp of the area. The biggest change we are doing right now is migrating subscribers to GPON (Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Networks) technology,” Sameer Geissah, vice-president of consumer home and multimedia services at du, told Gulf News in an exclusive interview.
GPON is the latest technology that offers higher speeds for customers and gives operators the access to administrative tools.
The new GPON set-top boxes “give us visibility” into when a subscriber has a problem. The boxes have “administrative access” back to the network back office. The problems can be fixed without any service guy visiting the home.
The operator has already migrated 50 per cent of its subscribers to GPON technology and hopes to complete the whole process by end of this year.
Geissah said the current optical fibre network offers 100Mbps download speed and 10Mbps upload speed while the GPON technology can increase the download speed limits up to 2Gbps and 100Mbps upload speeds.
Regarding 2Gbps, he said that it will depend on how fast the customers consume the bandwidth.
“It took us six months to analyse that the current download and upload speeds are saturated. We will review the situation in January 2016, and depending on that we will increase the speed,” he said.
The operator now offers download speeds of 8, 16, 24 and 100Mbps.
People download more stuffs than upload and that is why telecom operators globally offer more speeds for download and lesser speed for upload.
“We will be offering bundled packages, and it is designed especially for the gamers. Gaming requires huge bandwidth and low latency. Latency increases as more devices are connected and it eats into the capacity,” he said.
He said that there are villas in Dubai, which have more than five bedrooms, which have taken multiple fibre connections, each with 100Mbps.
When asked whether consumers need such high speeds at home, he said that as games are getting sophisticated and consumers are getting into virtual reality and augmented reality, high speeds are needed. It is not just the latency that matters; it is the bandwidth. Gamers are downloading huge amount of data.
Google Photos, which takes all the photos in your devices and put it on the cloud free of charge, needs big upload bandwidth; otherwise it will run forever if you have a low bandwidth and plus if your are gamer, it will spoil your gaming experience, he said.
“It will be competitive but it will be for premium customers. Customers are not bothered about the technology, what they care is about the speed,” he said.
