Labor is promising to connect more homes to the National Broadband Network (NBN) via fiber, if the party wins the next election.  But communications spokesman Jason Clare says that task grows more and more difficult with every day that Malcolm Turnbull's government remains in power.

The problem, according to Mr. Clare, are the commitments that the Turnbull government has made to its fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) policy.  Labor says FTTN is "second rate" and "wasteful", because it connects from the nodes to homes via Telstra's copper network.  Critics say that system is slower and is already obsolete.  The government says it saved money by going with FTTN.

How Labor plays this card will depend on when Prime Minister Turnbull calls the next election.

"The longer the coalition is in government, the more second-rate FTTN they roll out," said Mr. Clare.  "If we win the election, we can't just click our fingers and make all the nodes disappear.  It's impossible to go back to that original model without wasting tens of billions of dollars of investment that Malcolm Turnbull sunk into a second-rate version of the NBN."

Mr. Clare also notes that the cost of bringing fiber directly to homes has gone down to about equal with FTTN, and there's no reason to relegate homes to the slower service.