Telstra has just announced plans to upgrade its HFC network in Adelaide, Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sydney and Perth to support download speeds of up to 100Mbps, but oddly it does not seem to be too keen to tell customers about it.

Is the Coalition getting desperate to find ways to attack the NBN? The latest assaults from its chief protagonists Malcolm Turnbull and Paul Fletcher certainly suggest this to be the case.

A forthcoming announcement by Optus and Motorola of a new smartphone hints at some intriguing possibilities.

4G is a much misused terminology in the world of cellular communications, but US telco AT&T and Apple are bolding taking the definition of 4G where it has never been taken before.

Hoping to confirm the oft-repeated claim that NBN Co's choice of first release sites was politically motivated the Sydney Morning Herald sought, and obtained, NBN Co internal planning documents under Freedom of Information legislation.

A decision by French mobile operator SFR to offer femtocells free to all its customers suggests that that they offer benefits for operators as much, or more so, than they offer for users.

At its I/O developer conference in San Francisco in May Google gave a sneak preview of its Android@Home project, designed to extend the Android platform into household objects. Its acquisition of Motorola Mobility adds a whole new dimension to this, thanks to Motorola's 4Home business.

The latest anti-NBN report from the Murdoch press - not known as the number one fan of the project - has revealed that "an $800 million deal with Optus [for the closure of its HFC network] includes an 'anti-disparagement' provision," but it's no big deal and no different to conditions applying to Telstra.

When a high profile company gets rid of four senior high-profile executives it needs to take the initiative instead of waiting for the bad news to leak out.

The Coalition has once again repeated its now jaded argument against the NBN: there is no hard evidence to support the idea that we need the 100Mbps that the FTTH network will deliver. Maybe not, but there are portents aplenty. Coalition pundits just need to be a bit more visionary.

NBN Co's submission to the ACCC on Telstra's structural separation undertakings goes to great lengths to counter the argument that restrictions stopping Telstra marketing mobile services as a direct substitute for the fixed network NBN will be detrimental to mobile competition, but in so doing it once again raises the spectre of the NBN being undermined by mobile broadband services.

Facts are fast giving way not just to speculation and opinion but to outright falsehoods as the latest Coalition NBN scare campaign gathers momentum.

Vodafone Germany is reported to be planning to abandon the use of copper for delivering broadband services and migrate four million broadband customers to its LTE network.

Shadow Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull has issued a lengthy press release claiming that NBN Co is seeking the freedom to hike its wholesale prices at rates way above inflation, but this is a gross over-simplification of a very complex issue.

I might be drawing a long bow, but rumours that Telstra is going to open up Next G to resellers have been circulating for months, and AARNet is definitely going to be reselling somebody's mobile broadband service.

It's a question that has been asked a thousand times since the Labor Government unveiled its $43b NBN plan promising 100Mbs to the 93 percent of Australian homes and businesses that would be connected to fibre: "What will we use all that bandwidth for?"

There is enormous potential for mobile operators to offer consumers security and management services for their smartphones, and a service launched by KDDI America suggests an intriguing possibility.

Optus last month became the first mobile operator in Australia to offer femtocells as a full commercial product. Optus promoting them as solution for Optus mobile customers with poor coverage in their homes.

Remember when carrier operated public WiFi hotspots were all the rage? Telstra, Optus and a handful of private operators were rolling them out in coffee shops, airports and on the street. Sure every other coffee shop today has free WiFi, but the big telco-operated networks have all but disappeared. They could be about to make a comeback.

News emanating out of the US of a new and "revolutionary" wireless technology have, predictably, been seized on by opponents of the NBN that the Government should not be putting $36b worth of eggs in one technology basket, namely FTTH. Before they shoot off at the mouth the Cassandras of the NBN should read the claims for the technology more closely.