[mbo (Pat and Kirk)]

The original letter was complete rubbish, just another right wingers rant against a labor party plan. It seems to have originated in a response on the Herald Suns website. The poster doesn't seem to realise that the plan is NOT about how to get a bit more web browsing speed for Joe and Jane in Woopwoop, it's about a national communications infrastructure upgrade on a similar scale to the original roll out of copper in the late 1800's. NorthernLight's previous posts have described the idea well.

Fibre optic cable has a maximum theoretical lifespan of 25 years when installed in conduit

Wrong - 25 to 30 years seems to often be used as a sort of amortizaion period for optical cables. The maximum life is yet to be determined because so much of it is still in the ground and working fine after more than 3 decades. See here and here.

You can not give every house 100Mbps. If you give several million households 100Mbps bandwidth, then you have exceeded the entire bandwidth of the whole internet

Another suspiciously non techie response from a supposed communications expert! What on earth is "the bandwidth of the whole internet" !
1. Our current ADSL network is similarly over subscribed, no network is designed to carry maximum traffic from all subscribers at the same time.
2. This is a national communications network, not just a web page feeder. I might get high speed between my office in Sydney and the branch in Adelaide, but not expect anything like that to somewhere in the USA
3. Infrastructure allows for growth, you don't build a freeway to just meet current demand, you allow for growth. When intercontinental bandwidth rises, the NBN will have the capacity to use it.

New DSL technologies will emerge

Yes , but so to will new optical technologies and the optical will blow them out of the water. Copper wire speed improvements have all come with a corresponding decrease in range. At the basic physical level, copper can't do what optical can do.

4G wireless ....

Same problems as copper only much worse, Light has many thousands of times the information carrying capacity of microwave radio.

Yet we are led to believe that the same people who cant build school halls ...etc

Just blatant political blathering, I'll ignore it. I don't care which government presides over a NBN, as long as they build a 'real' one, and like water and roads, I'd prefer it out of private hands.

Originally Posted by mswhin63

1Mbs to 3Mbs ... This is more than enough for anyone.

That sounds a lot like the (supposed) Bill Gates quote about 640K of RAM . I provide an IT service to businesses over a large geographical area and I love the prospect of a NBN. You have to realise the possibilities that it raises. Last week I drove 140 KM to a client so I could load 56 GB of data from a backup, wouldn't have needed to if I had a connection to them that was comparable to the network speed within my own office!
Think of what this means for business opportunities

Originally Posted by Bassnut

As far as I can calculate, the NBN would cost some $3000 per working tax paying person in Oz (given its $40Bn).

Yes it's expensive, major infrastructure is. The Snowy scheme cost todays equivalent of about 6 Billion. The population has grown about 4x
So it would be equivalent to around a 24 Billion dollar project now. In the ballpark?

Originally Posted by Bassnut

Country folks bang on about how much better and cheaper they have life generally, so they can pay more for the internet, stuff em.

... same back at ya, with a cherry on top