Yuyutsu, its called progress and change. Must be you are getting old and change scares you. So i am sure that you don't drive a car with emissions control or unleaded fuel, still use an analog mobile phone, never consider digital television and are happy for business in this country to comunicate with morse code.
Change hardly constitutes a nanny state.

Running fibre to every house is the Internet version of building a concrete free way to every small street. As many people have pointed out, there is a good chance that the demand for this speed will grow within the next decade or so.

However, the NBN lite version of upgrading the backbone only does not preclude this, only delay the second phase until it is required.

There are two main reasons why this delay is advisable:

1 Until the demand for these higher levels are in place, the government will be required to subsidise the "company" at taxpayers' expense.

2 Optic fibre cables and equipment has until recently been almost exclusively designed for industrial uses with the commensurate high costs. As this technology undergoes the same consumer competition, the prices and quality will fall drastically.

This means that even delaying the second phase a few years will drastically reduce the costs in real terms, and the required modems in the homes will probably be smaller, cheaper, more energy efficient, and have capabilities that we can only dream of today.

Who would realistically buy a computer today for needs he might have in 3 years?

Luddites.

I presume you lot are happy with your 56k dial up modems and never use UTube, Google Earth, Bittorrent, Skype, Flickr, Streaming video/movies, ITunes, Iview, games and downloads of all sizes and shapes etc etc etc. None of these things were even dreamed of ten years ago. With our crappy telecoms infrastructure we dont even get to use these new products to their full potential.

A fibre optic system will be longer lived and have lower maintenance costs than the current system. The current copper based system is on its last legs anyway and desperately needs replacing after decades of government and Telstra neglect and cutbacks. Would you lot really have them just replace copper with copper? Have you seen copper prices lately? It will also replace Telstra's damaging, self serving monopoly on infrastructure.

Who knows what new applications and products will be invented to make use of what will be a giant step forward from what we have now.
Just a few imaginings comes up with things like
Much more telecommuting and business done via the net
Real time access to surveillance footage. (crowd sourcing security)
Medical imaging and conferencing, maybe even consulting, in remote areas
Larger, or even true unlimited, download limits.
Growth in gaming both playing and designing.
Mobile coverage will improve as will mobile speeds and bandwidth.

The largest part of the cost is making it near universal. The costs of connecting those that live in country areas are huge. But would you deny your fellow Aussies a service just because they live out of town? Dont all our farmers and primary producers deserve the net too?

Build it and make Australia part of the future not just a dirty old quarry and coal mine.

mikk,

My point exactly this is a strategic plan.
On thing I notice about capitalism you supply a technology some entrepreneur will see it as a new opportunity.

You should be aware SM is too busy waving his "vote for Libs" dogma to see the probabilities.

Mikk,
You seem to reflect the labour party attitude.
You would go ahead without a cost benefit analysis I presume.

This is probably what an analysis would have found.
When the copper has to be replaced, replace it with fibre and where
a large customer or customers need fibre put it in and charge appropriately.

I don't have fibre here but I can do all the things you mention.
Except perhaps on line gaming.

Now for the killer statement;
Alcatel Lucent have developed equipment that can send 100 Mbit data,
which is the NBN speed, over a twisted pair for 1 KM .
This technique could be used with the fibre to the node.

For probably 95% of the ultimate NBN users their most pressing need
of perhaps 10%, would be for playing on line games !
Is that worth $43 billion of your money ?

No one on here is considering other than a "Business as Usual" environment.
The need of the internet will decrease and in some years hence the
internet itself will become unreliable and access may be restricted.

There are much bigger fish to fry than internet speeds.

Mikk; we all know that those outside of the capital cities have some
disadvantages. You also have some advantages.
All in all we make the decision where we will live.
We then have to live with it.
So, it will be possible to improve the speed for such as yourself and
that was and is being done anyway.
Fibre will I presume, be cheaper to maintain, but it is like a car, you
don't go and buy a new car when the 10,000 KM service comes up do you ?

Most of the copper in the ground has good quality plastic insulation
and will probably be sound for the next 100 years.
When energy depletion sets in and electronics gets into a very great
problem with rare earth and specialised material supply we might be
wishing that we still had the copper so we could re-install that old
time POTS telephone system.