The G.fast technology is promising to be a game-changer for home broadband providers by providing a copper-based alternative to fiber, but it is also increasingly catching carriers’ eyes with its potential to improve the economics of deploying dense urban small cells or Cloud-RAN. This trend, in turn, is bringing G.fast vendors like Adtran into the operators’ inner circle, extending their market reach. Mobile operators are increasingly interested and involved in the development of high speed fixed-line technologies such as G.fast, which boosts the speeds of existing copper lines over short distances (100 meters). Once this interest was confined to relatively long range backhaul options, but with densification and virtualization on many RAN agendas, the attention is shifting. One of the…