Shadow Minister & others
The fibre to the home is a Rolls Royce solution and likely to be at
a Rolls Royce price.
You will not get the 100Megabit speed, well you will, but the data
arrives in packets. The packets may include up to about 2000 bytes
perhaps, but what happens is that the gap between packets will increase
over what you experience now.
The reason for this is that time it takes for a file to arrive depends
not on the speed of the network but on the rate at which the remote
computer can dump its data into the internet.
It depends heavily on how many people are connected to the remote m/c.

Hope I have not been telling too many how to suck eggs.

There is one other problem, with fibre you will need to provide a
240 volt power point for the terminal equipment With Fibre to the node
that is not needed as DC is fed up the telephone line.
You will get the fibre as the electricity suppliers will insist so
they can run their smart meter system.
Re wireless, it will not be on the mobile telephone system I suspect
but may well be Wimax which can give ranges up to 100 Km from base
stations depending on antennas and heights.

SM,
I understood your point and or argument. My comments are still valid. What I'm saying is you are thinking now not the future. I would suggest that you consider ALL of what I wrote.

I was thinking national strategy not supporting someone's 'Cash cow' or 'captive markets'. I am not blind sided by specific commercial interests.

shadow minister, i have always thought that the NBN was fundamentally a good idea, but as you have exposed yourself as the expert pray do tell.

Is it true that optic fibre is capable of moving it's photon at light speed?

if this is correct then surely the future possibilities are limitless? (considering the meaning of light speed in a vacuum)

if the possibilities are limitless, then is not the only hold back the technology plugged in at either end?

Then if we restrict the ability with copper, are we not simply putting off cost till later when it will be more expensive? clem Jones was heavily criticised for his plan to sewer Brisbane back in the 60's. He did it anyway and found the money in the end at a cost much less what it would have been 10 years later.

The only problem i was having was labors ability to actually deliver such an ambitious plan.

Shadow Minister,I have to agree.I spoken to people in the IT industry who agree.We don't need it.There are more pressing issues like road/rail infrastructure.This Labor Party been driven by Corporate greed,so our taxes shore up their bottom lines.We do not need another $ 43 billion in debt.

All needs to be done is that Labor abandon their planned clean feed internet censorship nonsense.That will cost us nothing.

The fibre will terminate in a certain type of hub which will have a number of outputs, depending on what's required - internet, digital TV, digital telephony or whatever. The hub will have a battery backup if required so there would be no loss of connection in case of a local power blackout (although the peripherals would have no power anyway - just like a cordless phone).

Cost would be based on the amount of data transmitted, not just the available speed. The data could be voice, internet, TV, video-on-demand or private virtual networks for business users.

As someone who has also been in Telecommunications for 35+ years I can say that the days of analogue telphony are coming to an end. Even Telstra is retiring its digital network and moving to multifunctional IP-controlled "soft-switches" in the capital cities. Their Next-Gen network is coming (to the capital cities) regardless but fibre would take it to a whole new level. Rural areas however, would get nothing without the NBN and wireless-only is a dead-end solution.

As for it being a white elephant, a layer 2 Ethernet appearance in most homes is just the beginning of what's possible.
Looking at it from just increased Internet speed is missing the point, although most were happy with their dial-up 52K Modems only a few years ago.

To also think of it in purely economic terms rather than as infrastructure is a typical historic argument.

Why did we replace perfectly good gas lights in our streets with electric ones or build those big highways between cities when there was little traffic on the roads? Indeed, why replace perfectly good horses-and-carts with those expensive noisy machines in the first place?

The city of France had a huge fight with its population when it tried to introduce sewerage and drainage because it was such a huge unnecessary cost to the public.

In reality we are just playing catch-up with similar countries and economies and if we miss this opportunity, the next comparable one would be far more expensive.

Wobbles, I see that you are very technically knowledgeable:

Can you tell us, simpletons, in simple terms, what does all this entail for those of us who are already happy with what we have and wish to retain the same and nothing else for the remaining years of our natural lives?

Or, are you representing the nanny state, imposing on us that we must have what nanny believes that we "need", "for our own good", without ever asking for our consent?