There was widespread support across the community and business to break Telstra's ownership of both a wholesale arm and a retail arm. Telstra could have built the NBN but that would have exacerbated the issue of a dominant telco owning both the wholesale and retail networks. 50% of end user customers at the time had their internet with another ISP. The backlash politically would have cost government. Plus Telstra would have first tackled only those areas that had high competition and left everyone else on their wholesaled ADSL until last. I am in a coastal suburb a fair distance from Perth but got full FTTP back in 2013. It has been a rock solid connection and the only outage has been planned maintenance, unlike the ADSL copper that was using cables first laid around 80 years earlier.
Today we can enjoy both the NBN and 4/5G networks at a reasonable price. I churned my phone to a virtual network provider and a 365 day prepaid account. Almost zero monthly costs after a big shopping day.
