the original FTTP plan was never going to FTTP the entire country. most of australia - in the spatial sense of "most" - is sparsely inhabited and fixed-line is

the original FTTP plan was never going to FTTP the entire country. most of australia - in the spatial sense of "most" - is sparsely inhabited and fixed-line is uneconomic. the original plan was always satellite + wireless + FTTP, based on density and perhaps a bit of political pork barrelling, and it is quite likely that the original design of which regions would be serviced by which tech was also somewhat optimistic, and might need to have been adjusted, even if the FTTP plan wasn't torn up by the liberal-national coalition (the original FTTP plan was replaced with a "multi technology mix" plan -- the new federal government argued that their plan would be cheaper because instead of laying new fibre, just buy the existing degraded legacy copper lines from telstra, and also buy and reuse the HFC from telstra and optus. so instead of spending tens of billions of dollars of public money building brand new infrastructure, spend tens of billions of dollars of money and reuse existing degraded infrastructure! think of the savings! from memory getting the HFC regions to actually work was a bit of a fiasco, that part of the rollout was heavily delayed. anyhow, it is great to see the coalition lose another federal election, albeit entirely unrelated reasons)