NBN is aiming to potentially bring G.fast-based services to market in 2017, the company's chief architect, Tony Cross, has revealed.

NBN has conducted its first field trials of G.fast, Cross, revealed this week at Broadband World Forum 2015 in London.

In a blog entry Cross revealed that the first G.fast trial took place at an office block in Melbourne.

During the trial, NBN managed to get speeds exceeding 600 megabits per second over a 100 metre stretch of copper that is more than 20 years old.

"In fact, had we not reduced the frequency band used in the trial to avoid affecting other broadband services being delivered over the other copper lines, our trial speeds could have reached around 800Mbps," Cross wrote.

Over a 20-metre stretch of copper at NBN's National Test Facility the company has hit 970Mbps using G.fast.

NBN CEO Bill Morrow revealed in September the company was planning G.fast trials.

The G.fast standard was approved in December last year.

Within 400 metres of a distribution point, G.fast can deliver "fibre-like speeds" according to the ?International Telecommunication Union.

The standard targets speeds of 500Mbps to 1 gigabit for FTTB deployments at less than 100 metres, 500Mbps at 100m, 200Mbps at 200m, and 150Mbps at 250m.

The ITU began work on the standard in January 2011.

"As NBN looks at this evolution of broadband over copper from ADSL, VDSL, vector DSL to G.fast technology, all of these support using the existing infrastructure and maximising the performance that we can get over that," Morrow said at the most recent hearing of the Senate's NBN committee.

"We are keenly interested in this; if it proves to work as effectively as what it is initially said to do, then of course we want to bring that to Australia as well," the CEO told the 14 September hearing.