HFC vs. PON

Telstra is touting its HFC network: 100Mbps Telstra cable good enough for capital?

TelstraClear says it is investigating upgrading its InHome cable networks in Wellington and Christchurch so they can offer download speeds of 100 megabits per second.

The company says the upgrade would mean the networks could provide “substantially the same experience” as fibre-optic cable.

No, it really can’t. Not only isn’t this deployed yet, even if deployed it would only offer 100 to 200 Mbps of bandwidth shared across all customers in your neighbourhood (typically in the range of hundreds of homes). There is just no comparison to GE-PON and the now emerging and soon to be standardised 10GE-PON, providing 1 Gigabit and 10 Gigabits downstream shared between 32 customers respectively. Of course, you can expect 40 or 100 Gigabit Ethernet PON to follow too.