I don't see how it will be a white elephant. Telstra will sell their customer base and lease all the street ducting to NBN. The existing copper cabling will be pulled out and sold for scrap. Customers will have to connect to the fibre to make land line phone calls. There will be an option to connect broadband to anyone of the retail ISPs that have a contract to resell NBN.
In Tassie they currently have an option to choose between the fibre and copper but this is only because the deal with Telstra has not been signed off and won't be until mid 2011. Once that deal is signed there is no way Telstra will want to maintain the copper network that is defrading over time. We have seen the reports of 6,000 job losses in the next few years. These will come from maintenance staff currently looking after the copper network. Very few will be required on the fibre network as it will all be soft switching and no soldered joints.
And as for the comment that why does the Govt need to build it and private enterprise could do the job. The answer is that there are only one or two companies in the world that could raise $43 billion. Telstra couldn't raise that amount and certainly none of the others such as TPG, iiNet etc could raise it either. It needs govt funding - same as snowy mountains scheme did.
Besides private enterprise will cherry pick the most profitable areas and leave all the regional areas to just suffer 3rd world communications.
