Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for raising both these points. He is a very passionate advocate and also a very knowledgeable advocate for his own electorate of Banks, given his years of experience in the television and communications sector.

Let me make this observation: about a third of Australian households are passed by the HFC networks of either Telstra or Optus, or both. These networks are currently capable of—and are in many areas—delivering a 100-megabit-per-second broadband service, using a technology known as DOCSIS 3.0. Until the arrival of the NBN, that was by and large the best fixed-line product you could get in Australia.

Under Labor—as I mentioned earlier in my remarks about the member for Chifley's electorate—the plan was to pay Telstra and Optus billions of dollars to switch these HFC networks off to broadband and overbuild them with fibre to the premises. That, obviously, has a gigantic cost both in dollars and in time.

Remarkably, while the Labor Party, in their negotiations with Telstra and Optus, paid those companies to switch these networks off and decommission them, render them valueless, they did not reserve the right to use any part of them and this is true for the copper network as well—a most extraordinary uncommercial decision, and one can only assume done in order to make it hard for a successor government to take a different approach. Anyway, we have successfully negotiated since the election with both Telstra and Optus to acquire ownership to those networks for no additional payment to them but with massive savings, tens of billions of savings, to NBN Coalition. and to the taxpayer.

What that means is that we will be able to do, for example, in the electorate of Banks where 77 per cent of premises are already passed by HFC, is, over the course of next year, integrate that HFC network into the NBN network. By 2017, the company is estimating it will, with the introduction of a newer technology, DOCSIS 3.1, be able to offer a one-gigabit-per-second broadband service on HFC. That is equivalent to the top service available on fibre-to-the-premises.

See this speech in context