Gloves off on Australia's NBN: Turnbull articulates policy

Which direction?

The liberals policy before the election was to provide a fiber pair between exchanges for each ISP that had gear in those exchanges which would cut out a significant cost of providing real bandwidth to their end customers since now they have to pay Telstra to haul data between many exchanges and that is priced per megabyte. An ISP could easily run 10 gig of data down unused pairs that already exist (and were paid for by the tax payers). The liberals plan would have also allowed other besides Telstra to upgrade the DSLAMs in remote RIMs based on a "first in gets to change other carriers" model. Had the Libs won the last election more people would be able to get 40 mb connections today than will be getting those speeds from NBNco in the next 3 years.

The NBNco still hasn't explained how they are going to get 1 gig connections over a shared 2.5 gig media but there was talk about using the 25 gig PON that still seems to only work in carefully controlled lab experiments. There are projects going on next door in Kiwiland that can scale to 10 gig to homes. That starts to get to the point where its useful for things like cloud storage which is something AussiePON will never do.