"Fibre to the node will be gone," he said. "It's not a question of if this will happen, it's when it will happen and how it will be done. "If you vote for the Labor Party at the next election you will be voting for more fibre." Details scarce Mr Clare declined to release more policy details. But sources close to the party said it meant Labor would make the contractual changes required to deploy more fibre-optic cabling across Australia if it won government. It previously wanted 93 per cent of premises to be directly connected to the NBN using fibre to the premise technology. The sources said such a move would occur gradually because the locations already slated for fibre to the node would already have their deployments locked in. But rollouts planned after that would move to using more FTTP.

They also suggested the hybrid-fibre coaxial cables used for Pay TV services, may be kept given the billions of dollars being spent on upgrading them. The NBN project predicts just 20 per cent of Australian homes and businesses will get fibre to the premise, with 38 per cent getting fibre to the node or basement and 34 per cent getting upgrades to their hybrid fibre-coaxial, or HFC, connections, which are now delivering pay TV. The move would come with a risk of delay – the NBN under Labor consistently missed rollout targets due to lengthy construction delays and worker shortages. Mr Turnbull has said this would also result in years of delays and tens of billions of dollars in extra funding requirements. Independent telecommunications analyst Ian Martin said any shift in policy would come with a major rise in costs because of the difference between connecting homes with fibre optic cabling and fibre to the node. Full fibre costs more

"Fibre to the premise will clearly be a lot more expensive," he said. "It's just hard to say how many lines you'll have to replace in the [current system]. "Labor itself probably won't know until it does its own strategic review so it'll be another year or so [after a Labor election victory] before you can answer that." Most Australians under the Coalition will have to pay for their own upgrade to a full-fibre connection, making it demand-driven. "If you force the pace of upgrades you will incur costs before you get the returns," he said. "The returns are already pretty marginal so adding that cost without the corresponding benefit is going to push them down and probably quite materially." But Mr Clare said the Coalition's reliance on copper networks for the NBN meant in some locations, such as Newcastle and the Central Coast, more than 90 per cent of copper pairs needed to be fixed – a process the telecommunications industry calls "remediation".

He cited unnamed contracting sources, who said up to 15 per cent of copper lines in those regions had to be partly replaced. "Another contractor told me in Campbelltown in Sydney that NBN has had to recently replace almost three kilometres of old copper with new copper," he said. Last month, NBN told Fairfax Media almost none of the phone lines in its Newcastle trial sites had to be fixed.