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I used to be a network engineer at the big telco's
Yeah sure there is contention ratios but in reality we generally try to over provision the backbone, i.e. if contention ratios were really causing a bottleneck then I wouldn't be able to consistently and easily peak my adsl2 line. Whenever we saw the traffic graphs on the backbone start to get anywhere near 80%, we'd upgrade them. We would never let the links run at 100%.
The shelf life of fibre optics I hadn't heard so I asked someone who repairs the stuff. He said theoretically 25-30 years on paper but in reality it'll generally last longer - as mentioned above, it needs to be maintained like train tracks - a great analogy.
What the guy is missing completely in his email is that the NBN network is not being built for now, or even the next 5/8/10 years - it is deliberately being over provisioned for future proofing - say 25-30 years from now! It is smart to get the biggest bandwidth possible to houses - it's a heck of a lot easier to upgrade core network backbones than to replace the cables going to every house in the country.
There is stuff coming on the internet in 15-25 years that we can't even imagine yet - but one thing can be guaranteed - it will need low latency bandwidth in high amounts.
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