Can't resist replying.. sorry for nerd speak .
The government investment to the NBN is capped at $26-27 billion dollars. Furthermore, this is an investment, not a direct cost.. as in, Australian's stand to get this money returned, with a net cost to the public of 0 dollars. The NBN is not a government department, Conroy has no say in it's day to day running, the most he really has to do with it is the legislation that goes through parliament. Mike Quigley is the guy who is behind the NBN and he's one of the most respected and experienced people, not incompetent like both sides of politics. "Labor" (note the lack of a u) aren't rolling out the nbn, the NBN company is, the exact same people the Liberal broadband plan was going to use. It was listed in the policy, the exact same people that Labor are using, are the same the Liberals wanted to use.
Not even sure where to start with this.. Most obviously, most of my traffic is volume limited, not latency driven. Are you aware in other parts of the world there is no 'cap' on downloads? Sure pwning noobs with 10ms ping is wonderful for stroking your ego but not the reason the internet gets investment. The NBN stands to greatly improve bandwidth for Australian customers making currently impossible tasks like TVonDemand (which is very popular in the US with my friends over there) achievable. It also opens up entirely new uses for the internet which in Australia we don't even think of. In any case most people are connected to adsl, and fibre does actually have a lower latency than adsl by a fairly good margin. A lot of the copper in Australia is so old that it needs to be replaced some of it is over 50 years old, there are stories of telstra techs trying to pick up copper cables and starts to crumble in their hands from age. Fibre speeds can be upgraded by replacing the hardware on either side of the connection, the fibre doesn't need to be pulled out to increase speeds. The speeds fibre will be able to reach in the future may even reach terabytes, all without having to replace the fibre, just the hardware.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1256080
No idea where you got that latency number from but i'm pretty sure we haven't broken the laws of physics just yet captain. I'd love to know though, cause having a latency half the time it takes for light to go to the US and back is pretty cool .
Wireless is a last resort, there is FOUR HUNDRED TIMES the spectrum available in the infra-red portion of the electromagnetic spectrum used for fibre optics than there is in all of the radio frequency spectrum. That's just a fact of physics where the frequencies used for infra-red are many orders of magnitude greater than radio waves and subsequently there is far more spectrum bandwidth available. Only ultra-violet, x-rays, gamma rays etc have a spectrum advantage over infra-red fibre optics, but they have a nasty property of being ionising which destroys much of the matter that tries to contain them assuming you can contain them at all.
One of the key draw cards for the NBN is that Telstra IS GOING to be split. They have done such a bad job of supply Australia with decent backhaul that it is now significantly financially cheaper to destroy its monopoly by creating a new network :S. Thanks Mr Howard.
The Tasmanian NBN rollout so far has actually come out well UNDER budget.
Ps. yup Paul . Although it is worth noting the NBN stands to greatly improve network access in Major Centres as well as regional.