The CEO of NBN Co and the secretary of the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy have written a joint letter to the ACCC urging it to accept Telstra's proposal to cease delivering broadband services over its HFC network - as negotiated with the government.

Telstra has upgraded its Melbourne HFC network to provide 100Mbps download capability. The carrier is also introducing its own set-top box for free-to-air and BigPond TV channels.

The draft Telecoms legislation, now under scrutiny by a Senate enquiry, provides for the divesture of Telstra's HFC network but does nothing to ensure that change of ownership would make what is now a closed network an open access network, says ACCAN.

Telstra has been quick to respond to criticism of the capabilities of DOCSIS 3.0, and HFC networks in general, with a blog post on Nowwearetalking from its CTO, Hugh Bradlow.

While the headline from today's announcement by Telstra of plans to upgrade its HFC network in Melbourne to DOCSIS 3.0 might be the downstream bandwidth of 100Mbps, according to CEO Sol Trujillo the upstream bandwidth of 2.0Mbps is just as important and maybe more so and it (or rather the services it will enable) is what customers have been asking for.

There's long been a suspicion that Telstra deliberately holds back from delivering newer technology to its customers. Now CEO Sol Trujilo has confirmed it.

Statements made yesterday by Telstra CEO Sol Trujilo suggest the company could sacrifice swathes of its copper network to stave off competition from the successful National Broadband Network.

The ACCC has rejected a move by Telstra that would have denied Optus the ability to offer standard telephone services on the Telstra network in areas served by the Optus hybrid fibre co-axial network.