wiredinUSA November 2013

Bhutan’s winter power shortfall

BT trials G.FAST

Bhutan is looking to import up to 200 million units of power this winter, probably from India. With an estimated exploitable potential of 23,760 MW in hand, Bhutan's present installed production capacity is around 1,500MW. Despite its own generation of around 6,500 million units against an average annual domestic demand of only 1,500 million units, Bhutan needs to import power. As Mr C Rinzin, managing director of Druk Green Power Corporation (DGCP) explained, with most hydropower plants of Bhutan being on ‘run of the river’ schemes, generation is entirely water flow dependent. Water flow is at its lowest level during the dry winter season. This winter Bhutan’s wintertime import need is expected to reach 200 million units, with the upward trend likely to continue until 2016 when the 1,200MW Phunatshangchu project begins operation. Bhutan earns 45 percent of its total revenue and 20 percent of GDP from hydropower export.

Huawei has announced a fiber to the distribution point (FTTdp) G.FAST technical field trial in partnership with the UK’s BT. G.FAST technology allows existing copper connections to reach speeds comparable toopticalconnections,withthepotential to facilitate Gigabit per second broadband speeds to domestic and commercial customers without causing the major upgrade disruption associated with Fiber- to-the-Premises technology. Bymaximizing the potential capacity of existing copper wire infrastructure, successful deployment of G.FAST technology could accelerate the rollout of ultrafast broadband in the UK. The G.FAST trial, located close to the BT Adastral Park R&D centre in Ipswich, UK, has seen multi-port G.FAST equipment installed in undergrounddistributionpoints. G.FAST permits the last leg of an ultrafast network connection to be carried out with copper wire where previously only optical cable was capable of reaching adequate speeds.

wiredInUSA - November 2013

40