NBN Co's executive manager of corporate media, Tony Brown, said ASSIA was headed by key DSL technologist John Cioffi and that the claim had been made at a broadband conference in Paris last month.
Cioffi hoped he could achieve speeds of 1Tbps over 100 metres of copper, 100Gbps over 300 metres of copper, and even 10Gbps over 500 metres of copper.
The last speed could be one where the real benefit lay for NBN Co, Brown said.
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However, Brown pointed out that Cioffi had cautioned that this new technology would not be available for a number of years, "so we won’t be seeing speeds of up to 1Tbps over 100 metre copper lines for a while at the very least".
But Brown said, "the fact that we might have an emerging technology that could help us deliver faster wholesale speeds over the NBN network in the future in a potentially cost-effective and time-efficient manner is something we should all be excited about".
At the moment, the download speeds available on NBN connections are a maximum of 100Mbps and in many cases these speeds are never achieved.
NBN Co has been circulating stories about technologies that can provide faster download speeds for a while now. The most recent was one that claimed 1Gbps could be achieved over HFC cable.
Reacting to the NBN blog post, Internet Australia chief executive Laurie Patton told iTWire: “This is exactly why we need NBN Co to immediately abandon FttN and move to FttDP/FttC for the remainder of the rollout.
"Even if they do manage to push gigabit speeds over 100 metres of copper that won’t help people whose home or office is a lot further away from the node. In many cases we could be talking half a kilometre or more.
"At least if we get fibre to the driveway, we have the ability to upgrade to full fibre later on or use this new technology, if it eventuates, to deliver very fast broadband to everyone.”
