I was a couple of years away here but I was really looking forward to the NBN. Telstra has the only ADSL ports in town and pricing for what by world standards is a reasonably shit service is crazy.

If I have to munge a lot of data I just do it on a VPS and shuffle data back and forth to different cloud storage. I try and avoid downloading anything I might have to send back. I created a pipeline to process some video for work from the home/office it was way too painful on ADSL.

I can't imagine what it is like if you are a content producer. Just syncing my mobile camera images when I get home takes forever. And if my wife and I try to do Coursera and both kids wanted to watch ABC iView on their iPads everything just stops. With everything moving to HD and pretty much all services (including education) moving online my kids future is looking bleak unless something radical happens.

We have substandard services for lots of things in rural areas including health and education but being withheld a quality Internet service by Telstra/Murdoch/Abbott might be the last straw for us.

I just visited http://www.nbnco.com.au/when-do-i-get-it/rollout-map.html and saw that construction will start in one year. :)

I have absolutely no problems paying 2K or 5K for FTTH.

Yes but on the north shore you can already get 100mb cable internet.