I understand the need to support rural areas but the the majority of the initial budget was to cover non-metropolitan areas and while the govt has been messing this up, private industry (TPG, First Path etc) managed to cover huge swaths of the population with little-to-no government assistance.
About 60% of the population is clustered in 4 cities [0] and we're one of the most urbanised countries in the world [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_Australia#Cities
[1] https://infrastructure.gov.au/infrastructure/pab/soac/ & http://theconversation.com/density-sprawl-growth-how-austral...
The low population density of Australia makes backhaul and overseas transfer of data more expensive, and the last 2-5% of people might be very expensive to get. But the original goals of the NBN were well thought out and modeled properly.
Hu? You mean how they used copper put in place by telco incumbent Telstra, most of which were built when it was government owned? And how they relied on government mandated access to the copper lines to enable that?
Or are you talking about the small private fibre rollouts? Because they don't cover "huge swaths of the population".