Australian broadband provider NBN has begun HFC construction and commercial trials across New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, and Ovum was tasked with reviewing the results of the commercial HFC pilot in Redcliffe, Queensland. A PDF covering some of the technical details of the test is available here.

The trial deployment is being conducted on the Optus HFC network running DOCSIS 3.0 technology and is currently running tests across approximately 20 end users. Three companies are currently participating: Telstra, iiNet and Exetel. Ovum reports that NBN has been successfully delivering Layer 3 peak speeds at up to 100 Mbps downstream and up to 40 Mbps upstream beginning December 2015 through Jan 20, 2016, over the networks.

Given the test configuration placed the test devices in parallel with the end users, speeds throughout the day were also dependent on the activities of the end users. NBN calculated average Layer-3 speeds at 84 Mbps downstream and 33 Mbps upstream over the same test period.

NBN has been able to deliver these speeds through a redesign of the HFC network by utilizing faster modulation rates and ensuring the number of premises at the node does not exceed their specifications. NBN says it is confident its proposed HFC broadband speeds can be delivered across its HFC network moving forward through a number of initiatives including detailed network planning, node splitting and a move to DOCSIS 3.1.