"...Would save all that money by not digging up every street in Australia and no bottle necks...RamPage01"
RamPage01, the Street Cabinets are the bottle necks.
The Street Cabinets have a lower data capacity between the Street Cabinet and the exchange.
A simple example would be if you had a dedicated 12Mbps connection to the exchange for a single user. (It does not matter in this example if it is FTTH or FTTN, it is still one line one user.)
Now compare a single 12Mbps connection to the exchange but this time it is shared by 100 users. Bottle neck is created. This is how the cheaper version of the FTTN (Street Cabinets) is being designed.
The money saved by not digging up the streets and supplying a lower capacity to the Street Cabinets, is why doing FTTN is claimed to be maximum of $15 billion cheaper by the Libs.
The FTTN Street Cabinets are a false economy due to performance and upgrade issues. And this is not even considering the extra maintenance cost of the 86,000 Street Cabinets and extra maintenance required to maintain the remaining copper lines.
It would not take much for the $15 billion FTTN savings to disappear and surpass the cost of doing it correctly in the first place.
The UK example highlighted some of the issues of FTTN Street Cabinets, and the US have done some reports comparing the ongoing maintenance costs and issues of copper compared to the lower maintenance cost to fibre.
The NBN is being built to cater for Australia's needs for the next 50 odd years, and it is important we get it right.
The $15 billion over 8 to 10 years difference in doing the job correctly is warranted. Do it once and do it right.
