AT&T is stringing fiber lines to neighborhoods and using the existing copper lines to connect the rest of the way to homes.
But when landlords prohibit Verizon from installing fiber to each apartment, the company must use existing copper phone lines or cable lines to reach its customers.
Turnbull said the government's plan would in fact cost $94bn; the Coalition's would only cost $29.5bn, he said, because it would use existing copper networks.
It is spending just $4.6 billion to install fiber optic lines only to consumers' neighborhoods and then to use existing copper cable the rest of the way.
The service, which uses existing copper wire and fiber-optic networks, is not expected to hit the general market until around 2001.
She could begin to exert pressure through Berec, which in May won the power to scrutinize national decisions, to reduce the profitability of existing copper networks.
The company, which has already upgraded its existing copper network to increase basic broadband speeds, is more than doubling the number of homes in the UK that will receive a new fibre optic line over the next three years.
The Coalition's alternative offers "fibre to the node", that is to a Telstra box in the street, from which the existing copper wire connection will carry signals to our home.
About 90percentt of those connections will employ a technology called ADSL, which uses existing copper wires and is the way Telecom Italia plans to operate in France and Germany.
To extend D.S.L.'s reach, AT&T in December introduced AT&T U-verse, a program that runs an advanced fiber-optic cable into neighborhoods, then uses the existing copper wire to connect to homes.
Mr. Engel, the contractor, said that it is also possible to connect individual PEX lines to an existing copper system by using a fitting that accepts a copper pipe on one end and a PEX line at the other.
