We should have focused on tech. If only there was some sort of plan to install gigabit fibre internet to every house and business...
(The joke, for non-Australians, is that we had this, and it was under construction, but then the coal loving conservatives got in power and spent the same 70 billion dollars on installing copper phone line vDSL internet instead, which has actually been a downgrade for many people).
I had Gigabit network access twenty years ago (because I was a student). I could buy it today where I live now, I have plenty of money but I use 40/10 vDSL instead. Because it's fine, that's what having Gigabit all those years ago made apparent to me.
The UK has a horde of people who were absolutely 100% certain that Gigabit speeds will magically unlock... something. And they became available. And nobody cared, because it makes no difference.
Bigger numbers aren't better if the numbers you have are already perfectly fine.
8bit PCM at 11kHz sucks. 16bit PCM at 48kHz is fine. 24bit PCM at 96kHz is... not any better.
56-bit DES encryption sucks. 128-bit AES is fine. 256-bit AES is... not any better (yes it may be faster in some cases, it's complicated, but straightforwardly it isn't better)
The biggest problem in people's home networks tends to be Buffer Bloat, which isn't fixed by Gigabit except that it'll maybe make the vast buffers a bit more expensive and so the vendor will only put far too big a buffer, not far, far, far too big a buffer in your device.
I find it makes a massive difference as a remote web developer. So many 30 secs to 2 minute waits during the day that interrupt your workflow compared to London, where that just wasn't the case. Definitely has a negative effect on my productivity. On top of that, there's a lot more outages.
Faster? I thought it was 40% slower. Please tell us more!
One reason for installing fiber is because it's superior infrastructure. It's not simply a gigabit network and gigabit speed is a irrelevant. Fiber will happily transmit hundreds of terrabits per second given the right endpoint hardware. It's install once and reap the benefits for many, many decades.
Another reason is because you don't know what innovations will arise from pervasive fiber connectivity until you have it and there is a ready market for those innovations. Just like mobile phones unlocked all manner of innovations no-one could foresee.
Australia could have been at the forefront of internet connectivity, instead they have a third rate network for billions of dollars spent, all due to political interference.
Though I would say that apartment buildings in the metro areas could have just used Fibre to the basement, that would have been fine. Let the building landlords upgrade the connectivity based on demand from the occupants.
Also because a lot of attention had been fixated on the speed of the infrastructure, that let the Liberal party call it overbuilding and unnecessary, and now we have a dog's breakfast of shitty technologies used. Meaning a varied network street by street, house by house, all a mess, and nobody has a clear understanding of what the NBN is meant to be.
If the aim is to engineer a 'paradigm change', maybe it should have been tested a bit more first. Something like the old charter-city idea. It is a mistake to look to the political sphere to sustain a grand paradigm shift. They change direction every couple of years, and they aren't very technologically inclined right from the get go.
As it was, the NBN rollout looked a lot like a desperate and poorly planned giveaway to the independent electorates where it was first rolled out. Might even have been able to do it in a bipartisan way, although that is a lot to ask for, if not for that. As it happened the NBN was a political stunt on introduction.
I spent 6 months living in a house with no internet, waiting to get connected to the NBN. The house I rented before that had ADSL and was fine. I couldn't really tell the difference between ADSL and fiber, but the 6 month break from the internet in between does make a comparison hard.
Some people get unlucky and don't have a good copper cable. They aren't normal cases. The copper network was fine. I hope your troubles on rainy evenings isn't too bad, but it isn't proof of anything much. Except maybe that nobody is stupid enough to maintain a cable that is about to be ripped up by the government.
And Gigabit is certainly not overkill when viewed on a 50-year timeframe, which is realistically how long this infrastructure is(/was) meant to last.
"Gigabit will make sense later" is what they were telling people 35 years ago too. Back then they were explaining to people that you'd be able to watch movies at home some day. Yup, you sure can and of course you don't need anywhere close to a Gigabit to do it.
The applications for household Gigabit remain a mirage decades later.
So... They are ripping out the copper going into people's houses, and replacing it with - Copper. Yeah.
The point was primarily the future-proof-ness of the proposed network. Much* of Australia's copper infrastructure is old and dodgy and it was common for technicians to solve water ingress issues with plastic bags and tape.
* I don't know specific numbers, but there's a wealth of amusing anecdotes about rotten copper in Australia's infrastructure.
Gigabit has changed my life after moving away from Australia.
Maybe I should have clarified that it was gigabit capable. They weren't offering gigabit speeds to home users yet. Technically it was 2.44Gbit shared between each group of 24 homes.
This is not overkill, it's how the GPON standard based fibre works. Any fibre you're going to install anywhere is going to be gigabit capable. That's what the standard is.
It was not more expensive to put in gigabit fibre than to put in 100Mbit fibre.
Plus, even if it was - why would we install something that is only okay for now, rather than something future proof and rip the whole thing out to replace it later? Why build a country wide network that's only fast enough for five years?
Also, you have no right to claim to speak on behalf of everybody regarding your personal speed requirements.