Bazz,
The answer to your question is both. FO bundles are fragile because they are like glass; any crack is across the face at 90% rendering that fiber useless. Not a problem if the contractors know what they are doing. Do NBN contractors?

The first really big FO bundles were laid in Southern California in the 80’s, I worked for the Telco laying them, these were 6 inch bundles (250mm), have you seen the pathetic 25mm rubbish we are putting in?

We were putting almost 1000 times the bandwidth in the ground in the 80’s than NBN is currently laying. Not that it matters because even most of what the Yanks put in 30 years ago is now obsolete. Thanks to satellite, wireless, advances in copper signal synthesis multiplexing and the fact that copper only requires one end to be powered to maintain the link, FO can only operate if both ends are powered.

How good is that in Australia? Home phone or vital E-Health link anyone?

The ducts move all the time, mostly through the ground drying like rock then becoming water logged and shifting, again if done by professional engineers like Telstra, the risk can be minimized but is still much higher than copper. Copper on the other hand is brilliant, malleable, won’t “cold work”, crack or corrode and can already handle 100 Mbs/s.

The thinner the bundle the greater the percentage loss from damage and the higher the risk of failure under any conditions, not so with copper. NBN is an “orphan” in technological and economic terms. Ask yourself why undersea links like those between Singapore and North America are copper not FO?

We forget that room temperature super conductivity is not far off, down from minus 268 degrees to minus 90 degrees, but it doesn’t work with fiber. The NBN is technological madness, unless you wish to argue the case with Faraday

I suppose the pay-a-bit-less but get-a-lot-less Liberal alternative is supposed to be some sort of solution?

Well where is their so-called "business case" to justify their own plan?

There can't be. There's no such thing for national infrastructure. What's the case for building a Hospital for a community? What's the case for not building one?

Meanwhile, behind the scenes it's always been Rupert Murdoch that wants it scuttled because it will cost him money. Abbott said he would dismantle it the day after his meeting with Murdoch but now he realises people want it regardless.

The next best option is to give them a nobbled version that will choke at providing a viable alternative to high speed download that will make FoxTel redundant and open the market up to more players.

Most people with ADSL working via RIMs or CMUXs are already on Fibre-to-the-Node but don't know it.

NBN may be Broadband but what Abbott is promoting is only Fraudband.

It's a fake solution to a political problem and will probably be changed after the next election anyway.

Spindoc, thanks for the rundown. I have never worked with fibre so my
knowledge of it has been picked up in various conversations.

One question I have never had an answer to is, there are a considerable
number of fibres in the cable, all lying alongside each other.
Are the signals run down all the fibres in parallel or is each fibre
allocated a slice of spectrum ?
Having watch a cable being spliced I presume the first option is the correct answer.
If so does this not give some redundancy ?
Or if there are fractures, do they cause phase errors ? and thus make
the cable unusable ?

You can gather from my questions I am fairly clueless about the
practical usage of fibre.

BTW, in the US it seems that the number of landline less houses has
increased 10% this last year to 17 1/2%.
If that gets repeated here, it will crash the financials of both NBNs.

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/12/number-of-landline-free-households-up-10-in-us/

The NBN might be expensive but so was the opera house and I am inclined to think a lot more Australians will find use for the NBN than visit the opera house. Maybe its an white elephant we need to accommodate?

Look, I'm on Telstra's $100 a month Liberty cable plan which is sold on the basis of a supposedly a "blazingly fast" 100 Mbs and it's complete bull. If I'm downloading something from a reliable site say,Steam or Apple's App store I get 4.0 MbS at most provided no one else in the house is using the network. If anyone thinks they're going to get "fast" internet from either plan they're dreaming, yeah things like e-health, which nobody will use anyway may be possible in some areas but to most people the internet is Facebook/Twitter/Instagram,gaming iTunes,uTorrent and shopping, none of which need anywhere near 100Mbs.
Gaming is another supposedly big seller for the NBN, well I spend a fair amount of time gaming online and the most popular games don't need "super fast" broadband or even very powerful computers. In fact the trend is away from high definition, "blockbuster" games toward low tech, low budget social games like Minecraft and Farmville and competitive e-sports titles like Counterstrike or League of Legends.

Apart from the 90 billion plus cost of building the thing I don't think many Australian households realize just how much it is going to cost them to connect let alone use the system.
I get 500 to 600 Kb/s now with telstra and that is good enough for me but when this is finished I will have to connect weather I like it or not because there will be no alternate.