[LINK] Minister, Turnbull, Windsor...discuss NBN on Insight

[Chris Maltby]

On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 11:05:28AM +1100, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
> What I was talking about is the HFC between the node and the
> home and whether it really needs to be replaced with fibre.
> There was a bit of discussion about the fact that Deutche
> Telecom was upgrading their copper.

In short, Conroy is right. Whether the cable modems and nodes could be
reconfigured to allow an uplink speed of 100Mbps and still allow the pay
TV and video on demand stuff they deliver to be a viable operation is
unknown to me. I'm sure it is technically feasible to get an uplink
speed of 100Mbps. It would certainly require the number of customers per
node to be a lot less than 2000.

If you were going to upgrade the "copper" - or the Cable bit that hangs
from the poles, why not extend the fibre closer to the customer - either
to the pole or to the customer's premises.

Chris