The Best NBN 1000 Plans to Check Out Ahead of the HFC Speed Boost

NBN Co will be removing the speed cap on Hybrid Fibre Coaxial (HFC) connections at the start of May and increasing capacity for high-end plans. What this boils down to is faster speeds for HFC users who have an NBN 1000 plan. Really, it’s a better time than ever to consider trying out NBN 1000 if your home is connected via HFC.

Only households with an HFC or FTTP connection can sign up for this fastest NBN speed tier and chase their dreams of 1000Mbps (1Gbps) download speeds. But HFC connections have always been hard capped at 750Mbps – a far cry short of the 970Mbps of FTTP connections.

That said, HFC connections have generally fallen short of their speed limit, anyway. Even if you signed up to a provider with great NBN speeds, your downloads might never have gone faster than 700Mbps at best. And if they did, it likely wouldn’t have been for sustained periods.

That should change come May 1, according to NBN Co. Once the speed limit is lifted, NBN 1000 customers with HFC connections should enjoy ‘consistently faster speeds’, letting them enjoy the premium NBN speed tier to a fuller potential.

Here’s a selection of NBN 1000 plans, ranked by fastest typical evening speeds:

For comparison, here’s what you’d pay for the fastest NBN 250 plans:

HFC connections on the NBN use the old Telstra (and Foxtel) cable networks, which allows them to provide faster speeds than those that rely on even older twisted-pair copper wiring, such as Fibre to the Node (FTTN).

While HFC does still use copper to transmit data for the final length of the journey, its coaxial cabling is thicker and more-heavily shielded than telephone cabling, making it more suitable for high-speed data transmission.

The reason it’s called ‘Hybrid Fibre Coaxial’ is because the rest of the heavy lifting is done by fibre connections that can handle significantly faster internet speeds than any copper line.

Alex Angove-Plumb is a journalist at WhistleOut, Australia’s phone and internet comparison website

Lead Image Credit: Pixar