New chips will “power the gigabit era of DSL,” Broadcom claims

Broadcom unveiled DSL chips that use the new G.fast standard to deliver up to 1Gbps broadband over copper phone lines.

That doesn't mean everyone who has DSL will suddenly get a huge speed upgrade. G.fast, a standard from the International Telecommunication Union, is intended for fiber-and-copper networks in which fiber delivers data close to homes and copper takes it the rest of the way. These networks are cheaper to build than fiber-to-the-home because they reuse existing copper, but thus far they haven't been able to match the gigabit speeds of fiber-only service.