Morrow announced that NBN would be halting the rollout of the hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) part of the NBN (which will eventually cover 3 million metropolitan customers) in order to fix up problems experienced by some of its initial 370,000.

There will be delays of about six to nine months for customers who thought they were about to be connected, while its workers go back and work out why some of its existing users have had problems with patchy connections and disappointing performance.

What great news for all customers eh? Three cheers for the NBN.

Of course it is better that NBN sorts out its problems with the HFC deployment before over 2 and a half million more people join the party, but (most) Australians are not mugs and should resent the bizarre attempts by the company to claim kudos for fixing problems many had predicted in the first place.

The latest problems with the NBN are an unwanted embarrassment for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was the loudest advocate for using HFC. AAP

The current HFC footprint (which for the non-indoctrinated is the cables that supply Pay TV) already only consists of cables formerly owned by Telstra, because NBN dumped the ones acquired from Optus after finding they weren't up to scratch.

Since deploying HFC in some homes it has found that there are unforeseen problems occurring inside the cable when as some of the signals for Foxtel channels effectively get in the way. It is a highly technical and highly difficult problem to fix.

Morrow says the delays will not affect its published targets, but it remains to be seen what happens if NBN can't solve the current problems and realises it will be better off scrapping HFC entirely in six months time.


HFC was one of the key aspects of Malcolm Turnbull's pitch for switching from Labor's "gold plated" fibre to the premise NBN, to a multi-technology-mix. He regularly pointed out the folly of Labor discarding it because it is capable of delivering fast speeds in the right conditions, and said it was already laid and good to go.

The fact that NBN is scrambling to fix problems should be acknowledged as yet another embarrassing setback, rather than dressed up as some kind of triumph of customer service.

This is how NBN announced the delays in its press release: "NBN Co takes customer experience improvement program to new levels ... New HFC rollout initiatives announced to help improve end user experience and retailer satisfaction."

I'm all for looking on the bright side, but that is like an attempt at satire that would be rejected by the writers of ABC's Utopia for taking things too far .

"NBN acknowledges problems for HFC customers and suspends rollout," would have been the honest headline, but boring old sanity has long since departed the NBN narrative.

Disgruntled customers aside, Telstra certainly isn't applauding NBN's good news either, telling investors today that the surprise delay will affect its earlier financial guidance, as it will now have to wait longer for some of its NBN payments for the HFC network.

So rather than applauding NBN for its latest efforts in "raising the standard of service quality" (yes really) ... the majority of us will just mark today down as yet another dispiriting stop off on the tortuous journey for a travel diary that will one day be entitled "How the bloody hell did we get here?"