What's even more unbelievable is that the world is going mobile. Oh well, at least they will be able to download ipirated movies and porno's quicker hey!

This article is based on ideology not practicality — a public monopoly is far easier to regulate than a private monopoly, and breaking the monopoly is impractical (the extra competition wouldn't be worth the additional cost of all the extra infrastructure). There is plenty of competition berween contractors at the supply level and between telcos at the retail level. But competition isn't the source of innovation; merely a pressure to implement it.

The real NBN scandal is that the government are trying to make a commercial return on it rather than trying to maximize the benefit to the nation, are lending money to it at an unnecessarily high rate, and worst of all are making decisions based on an even higher rate (8%) which is resulting in ridiculous conclusions (such as that investing in FTTN is good value for money).

When you are building a national system of roads you would start with interconnecting highways between major centres and then progressively work your way down toward local streets.

It's the same with electricity, water and gas distribution.

Anybody with an appreciation of the hierarchical structure of digital telecommunications networks and the use of optical fibre rings and protection bearers would appreciate this basic fact.

Of course it will take much longer during the early phases of construction but the final stages will be limited by available manpower to provide connectivity in suburban areas. I expect there will be even more 457 Visa workers engaged than now.

So Wobbles, as you appear to know your stuff, why didn't the government of the day tell us this.

We would have been better off building the Very Fast Train instead.
No one seems to understand that the time of such enormously
expensive projects is ending.
Going back to the start point we should have built the Fast Enough Train Network.
ADSL2 will suit almost everyone, after all if you have to wait and extra 100ms for
something to finish, will you really notice it ?