"It's regrettable, Quigley told the program, that this particular omelette can't be unscrambled: the Telstra agreements in place and nbnTM's ownership of the copper assets make it impossible to return to FTTP."
Which is exactly the way Abbott wanted it.
It doesn't matter whether one thinks FTTP was the best solution or not, or even whether the NBN as a whole was a good idea - or not. The fact is that it was there, on the table and underway, and Abbot wanted it destroyed.
The contracts that the LNP have signed the Australian people up to ensure that any future ALP government wishing to bring back the original FTTP plan will have to incur great costs in doing so, which is something that the LNP will be able to criticise loudly from opposition.
They have salted the proverbial earth in an act of political and ideological spite and I, for one, feel utterly betrayed by those who actively made this happen, and have done so without caring one iota that we, the tax payers, will be paying for this for decades.
It is a fact that an FTTP infrastructure is more future-proof than an FTTN one and a fact that the longer an FTTP network is in place, the cheaper it will become compared to an FTTN network. No serious analysis has ever suggested otherwise.
Given that, it doesn't matter how much bandwidth people want now. Even if, as people like aberglas (above) assert, the vast majority of people neither want nor need the speed that FTTP could provide, it would work out cheaper in far fewer years than one might think.
Of course, one might argue that the whole NBN concept - regardless of technology was inherently bad and wasteful, but it was already underway and so we must look at the outcomes from that point.
I am not joking, nor exaggerating when I say that I feel betray by Abbott and Turnbull here and, though I should be hardened to this kind of disappointment, it almost brings me to tears and, again, I am not exaggerating. This has cemented what I always knew anyway: that our politicians put the people last.