@ Shadow Minister

That's how I've been seeing this push for the NBN of late Shadow. The Americans want a kill switch and wire tapping for the internet. Our Fabian leaders want to watch what we're doing and cut us off anytime we might learn something about them they don't want us to know. A sinister path lies ahead I reckon.

One problem- whose to say the government wouldn't be able to demand the private company holding the infrastructure monopoly to implement the exact same procedures on their behalf?

Hence why a public owned monopoly is better than a private-owned monopoly. Same problems with government apply to a private company- but the monetary issues do not correspond to a public-owned asset beyond expenditure.
That is, beyond both needing to fund the entity, only one would stand from some necessity (or clear right) to implement further charges to profits and returns.

And Yuyutsu- although the procedure does not hurt per se, because they will install chips into you when you are asleep, sometimes the subjects feel great agony even in their dreams, along with the shocks of pain the government sends for free thought that they want to stamp out.

Seriously, can anyone who knows answer my original questions: I tried to ask the same on the ABC site, but it was censored (as usual).

1) When are the bad-guys coming to take our phones away?
2) What happens to the phone-network at home when the outside cables change from copper to fibre? does it mean that all phones at home need to be replaced by different devices, or is it possible to get some convertor to copper?

Technically I could answer 2;

When you change a copper cable to a fibreoptic, the only change is that the electric pulses are converted into light pulses and back into electric at the other side (improving both speed of transmission but also the amount of clear traffic on the line as lightspeed is virtually instantaneous, as opposed to merely lightning fast, reducing the time it takes to hold a line for the signals to pass through) . So for a fibreoptic conversion you would simply need to attach a light-reader to the existing device that converts signals into data- these you could buy in virtually every computer hardware shop, where they have been sold alongside fiberoptic cables for the past many years.

Thank you, I am not surprised you cannot answer #1!

So if I understand correctly, those converters can handle both the low-frequency phone conversations as well as the high-frequency ADSL traffic?

Indeed, I am sorry to disappoint you for 1;

But for 2, my answer is simply no in most aspects- as the ADSL internet and telephone are usually carried over the very same telephone lines- and would therefore have to have been converted into analog (phone) and digital (computer) signals for either to work, and to be able to travel over the lines respectively.

As signal cables generally work by transmitting digital signal (pulses of energy), the only difference would be to get a light that flashes whenever it gets an electric pulse to send a light signal, and for a device that will send an electric pulse whenever it is hit by a light pulse. From there, your computer itself actually turns the signals into information, and the telephone converts them into analog waves and then into sound (and they would ALWAYS be able to do these directly- they need to in order to function).

Another upside to fiber cables is that light tends to be much less potent than electricity- so it generates much less heat and is not an electrical hazard.