BT customers in Gosforth, Newcastle, are being given a chance to test copper's last hurrah, G.fast.

The DSL standard G.fast is hoped to help the extension of broadband access to fibre-foiling locations. It has been cooked up in Suffolk by BT, Alcatel-Lucent and its Bell Labs research arm.

BT claimed G.fast "eliminates the need to rewire entire buildings and homes, the most costly and time-consuming part of any fibre deployment".

Up to 2,000 homes in Gosforth will be included in a G.fast trial in the North East of England. The trial is set to provide the hitherto isolated region with data speeds BT reckoned will reach up to 330 Mbps, shooting down copper tubes and directly into humble Northern abodes.

The announcement followed a "much smaller but successful pilot" that BT and Alcatel-Lucent conducted in Norfolk earlier this year.

100 premises in Swansea were also included in a 2015 trial, while BT customers in Huntington, Cambridgeshire, were connected up in August.

Mike Galvin, BT's MD of Service, Strategy and Operations, said: "This is the largest trial of G.fast technology in the world today and extensive research by teams of experts at both BT and Alcatel-Lucent have prepared us well for this exploration into how the technology performs."

"With G.fast, we look forward to opening a new chapter in building Britain's connected future through the delivery of ultra fast broadband to more people in the coming years," he added.

Cormac Whelan, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent UK & Ireland said: "The latest analyst predictions say that within five years, something like one million minutes of video content will cross the global fixed or mobile network every single second.

"The demand for broadband has never been greater and is only heading in one direction so this G.fast trial is the right technology at the right time." ®