Korea kept its HFC cable, says Turnbull

Both Telstra and Optus have continued to upgrade their HFC cable networks over the past year, in spite of the fact that the NBN fibre - offering higher speeds and better latency will start to hit millions of Australian premises over the then several years.

In August last year, Optus completed a substantial upgrade of its HFC cable network in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney in other words allowing residents in supported areas access to speeds up ranging up to around 80Mbps or more, using the improved DOCSIS 3 standard. And in July Telstra nearly doubled the theoretical speeds on its HFC cable network in a clutch of cities around Australia, pushing the network from 17Mbps to 30Mbps.

However, some in the telecommunications industry - just as NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley, who said while the election last year that cable was a "souped up version of copper" - with the problem that bandwidth on HFC networks was shared between those connecting to it, opposite with the last leg mile of fibre to the home.