It’s interesting to see that the access network technologies based on good old copper local loops undergo permanent evolution and that there might be the day when gigabit speeds are carried over them. Today with VDSL2 speeds up to 100Mbit are feasible under ideal circumstances but in real world they are never reached.
But there are already new technologies waiting to increase the capacity dramatically. Vectoring is a mechanism to eliminate crosstalk issues and supports line speeds of greater than 100 Mbps on loops up to 500 meters in length.
http://www.broadband-forum.org/marketing/download/mktgdocs/MR-257.pdf
http://www.alcatel-lucent.com/vdsl2-vectoring/
http://www.huawei.com/ilink/en/solutions/broader-smarter/HW_258183
Phantom Mode is another technology which uses a “phantom” copper pair to increase the local loop capacity. This is under development and not a standard yet but some tests done by AlcatelLucent show that it supports speeds of 300Mbit on two copper pairs over a distance of 400m.
G.fast is the name of the latest evolution. It is still in draft and under development but there is already a field test done by Swisscom and Huawei which supports speeds over 400 Mbps at a distance of 200 meters!
http://www.huawei.com/en/about-huawei/newsroom/press-release/hw-145034-gigadslprototypeswisscom.htm
http://www.uknof.org.uk/uknof21/Maes-Gfast.pdf
All those evolutions allow Service Providers to improve the usage of the old copper local loops while investing step-by-step in local loop fiber infrastructures for even higher bandwidth demands to come.