Yeah..."fib to the node" is what we are getting.
To be honest, I believe the NBN is promising way too much to be realistic. In country side, you would be driving for a couple of hours before seeing a town with one dog and 2 people. You are not going to lay an optic cable for hundreds of Km just to link them in. Above all, they probably don't want, and/or don't know how to use a bloody computer anyway.
What about the remote aboriginal communities. They have enough issues of their own to deal with, let alone the damn Internet !
In the cities and the surrounding towns, folks are having difficulties paying power bills already. The NBN is just another icing on the cake they don't have, and can't afford.
We are talking about making Straya a clever country. Sure, the Internet does help. But it is not a cure-all. There are other issues that are causing our education standards falling. And no amount of NBN or Internet will fix it.
I am not surprised that contractors are becoming dodgy in the way they roll out. It is all about profit, innit ?