Well thanks for that nairbe.

If you are right in what you say, that makes a lot of sense to me, however, why wasn't this explained during the election?

My understanding was that all homes, or 97% of them, would have FO cables to the door.

Nairbe:

To the truth and the unpleasant reality above:

Consider:

Your local regional hospital and most other Government services and large private enterprises are already fibre cabled: As are major country telephone trunk routes and many junction routes. Huge areas of the country are now serviced with fibre cable where it has been considered technically necessary.
Where we move under the shady gum tree, is the promise to facilitate all subscribers to fibre cable. The Liberals are correct to question the necessity and practicality of such a huge and expensive undertaking.

rechtub
if you do want to install OF to your house, do the hard work yourself. We had OF installed 1 km from the main road and were gobsmacked by a Telstra quote of $60,000 to lay and connect the cable. Did a few sums, paid chap with a digger to make the trench, lined it with sand, bought the OF cable, stuck it in and then handed it over to Telstra to connect and own thereafter. Saved tens of thousands. Need to OK the arrangement with Telstra in advance, though - and their operatives were honest enough to admit after the event that their pricing had been ridiculous.

Candide, You are off track. I do not want FO to my properties. I don't even live there.

What I want to know is why are we looking to spend $43billion, which by the way, we don't have, in the hope that enough people will use it to make it pay.

I say, get a commitment first, then provide the goods.

What our government is doing, is putting the cart before the horse. But hey, why should they care, after all, it's not their money, nor are they accountable. The past few years have proved this.

Wouldn't a % 100 wireless coverage do the job ? That would probably cost only a few million to complete & we could use the other 42½ billion for freight & fuel subsidy. Now that would be a stimulus package with backbone.

Wireless will be used where it is lower cost to deliver a high speed connection. Unfortunately it is of limited capacity and can only handle a few subscribers within range. If we had it in the city and suburbs we would need a transmitter - with fibre connection - on each street. Once the fibre reaches your house then you will probably use wireless inside your house but even then you will most likely need repeater stations. Technologies normally take at least 10 years to go from the labs to commercialisation and as far as I know there are no wireless technologies in the lab that will do the job without a massive number of transmitters.