I've tried to write the above comment as un-biasedly as possible, just to give you the info and what the arguments are about. For what its worth, I think that

I've tried to write the above comment as un-biasedly as possible, just to give you the info and what the arguments are about. For what its worth, I think that the 50% extra price to connect an extra 71% of homes directly to fibre is worth it. I like to use the analogy of the rail networks being built in the USA, or the interstate highways, or even the light rail in Calgary. Each is a massive project, which costs quite a bit of money, but in the long term, repays the investments many times over in the things they enable. The opposition is guaranteeing that nobody will have less than 25mb/sec, and the government is touting a maximum speed of 100mb. But they seem to shy away from the fact that 100mb is just the speeds you will get with todays technology in the exchanges. I'm not too familiar with networking hardware, but it seems that increasing the speed of a FttH network is much easier than the FttN network, because it involves replacing hardware in the exchange. Whereas with FttN, you are fundamentally limited by the copper connections to the houses. I heard the opposition communications spokesman yesterday on the radio, talking about "What will the average person possibly need with 100mb/sec?", but then you could ask the same thing for their 25mb/sec connection: "What will the average person possibly need with 25mb/sec?". I know right now, that my mum, sisters, brother, etc would not be able to utilise that bandwidth. I think that by conceding that 25mb is the minimum suitable bandwidth for the future, they are conceding that faster networks will be required in the future. So why limit it at the arbitrary value of 25mb and say "This is all we will need".