There are a lot of new estates over the last 5 years or so that have fibre all the way into the home. See Telstra.com and look for Velocity sites. In some cases such as Pt Cook in Victoria Telstra have pulled out the old copper pairs and replaced them with fibre as the customers were too far from the exchange to support ADSL over copper. Fibre has virtually no distance limitations (might need a repeater every 500 kilometres or so)
They just pull out the copper pair running in via the existing lead in conduit and use that as a draw wire to pull through a fibre pair. Connect the fibre pair into an optical terminating box on your house wall and you plug your phone or PC into that.
Piece of cake really - there are just a few million houses and businesses that need doing and that is what will take time
