Huawei, the telecommunication solutions provider, will continue on with its planned partnership with Victoria's RMIT on a new high-speed broadband training centre even if the $43 billion NBN project gets scrapped.

John Lenders, Victoria's Labor ICT Minister, touted Melbourne's selection as the NBN's operations hub as a victory for the state last July.?The Next Generation Technology Training Centre was expected to help remedy a national skills gap in the construction of the project. About 500 new training spots were expected to be opened in Victoria alone.

The Chinese company will be lending financial support to the centre. Huawei would also be dedicating permanent staff for research and development to train students on how to use the technology it hopes to sell to NBN. However, the project's future is uncertain because Labor may have to throw broadband onto the bargaining table as it tries to court support from rural independent MPs to govern.

Luke Coleman, spokesman for Huawei, said that in spite of the company's heavy linkage to the NBN, Huawei would continue to give its full support to the centre regardless of the NBN's fate. Even without the NBN, the centre could still be used for activities around emerging mobile broadband technology such as LTE.

"Huawei's plans to establish the centre with RMIT will remain in place regardless of the election outcome. Huawei is committed to ensuring Australians are trained in delivering next-generation broadband technology," said Coleman.

If the project is cancelled, the NBN operations hub faces the loss of around 700 jobs. Lenders criticized Ted Baillieu, the Victorian Liberal leader, saying that he is too weak to stand up to federal opposition leader Tony Abbott on the broadband issue.

"Tony Abbott clearly doesn't care about Victoria's ICT industry and Victorian Liberal Leader Ted Baillieu is too weak to stand up to him and fight for hundreds of Victorian jobs... We said before the campaign that Victorians should support Labor's NBN or all of these benefits may be scrapped by Tony Abbott," said Lenders.

Labor and the Coalition is almost certain to attempt selling two vastly different broadband policies to rural independent MPs Tony Windsor, Bob Katter and Rob Oakeshott. Currently, the two parties are tied at 71 seats each in election counting, the Greens have one seat, independents are holding four and only three undecided.

The Coalition plan promises to provide 97 per cent of households a minimum speed of 12 megabits per second on a $6.3 budget. The scheme will make use of a mixture of HFC cable, DSL and fixed wireless services.

Labor's plan, on the other hand, will be using fibre-optic cable to offer Internet speeds of 100Mbps to 93 per cent of the population. The remaining seven percent of the population will provide minimum speeds of 12Mbps through the use of a mix of wireless and satellite.

Oakeshott has voiced his support of the Labor plan to business leaders in his home electorate. However, in a report on the Australian, many local authorities in seats held by the three independent MPs said that regional broadband was low on their list of urgent priorities.