High Speed Copper and Coaxial Broadband

of deeper fiber is facilitated by the ability to leverage the remaining copper drop for providing ubiquitous gigabit access to everyone within the service area. In contrast, fiber roll-outs that don't leverage the copper network are regional - as region-by-region is upgraded to full fiber, the remaining regions are under-served. This feature topic addresses copper technologies and deployment practices beyond those currently available. For twisted pair, one article by Oksman et al. presents the status in standardization at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) of Multi-Gigabit Fast Access to Subscriber Terminals (MGfast). This technology, beyond facilitating gradual fiber deployment and providing fiber-like data rates, is also being prepared for delivering quality of service at par or beyond those considered for 5G services. A second paper by Lamparter et al. presents architectural options for introducing MGfast in operators' networks, and for cost effectively migrating from existing practices based on G.fast. For coaxial networks, one paper by Berscheid et al. describes Full Duplex DOCSIS, and how it enables to remove the upstream bottleneck in present-day coaxial access. It presents opportunities and challenges, both from a technology perspective as from a network architectural perspective. The last paper in this feature topic by Coomans et al. shows that a hybrid fiber coaxial network with a coaxial drop from the last tap can provide in excess of 40 Gbps to each end user by exploiting up to 6 GHz of baseband spectrum.