So you have to send all the techs and teams out twice to dig up the road? The end-of-the-line has always been the most expensive part, that's why it made more economic and technical sense to do it all at the same time rather than double your work to save 25% cost. And with a projected finish date of 2020 (which is highly unlikely), you'll only begin to start rolling out the second stage at 2022, to replace technology that would be outdated if it were finished today.

And the second stage will never ever happen anyway, because it took us 30 years to replace the crappy copper network and even that could very well have been the straw the broke the camel's back for the government. In 2022 when everything is "finished" (shifted goalposts included) it will take another thirty years for the government to finally admit that 25 mbps in a 2gbps world isn't enough. And Australia will still stagnate as the anti-investment, anti-intellectual, FYGM backwater that it is today.

e: I'd love to see where those figures in the earlier link came from.

Revenue at completion date AU$21.7 billion AU$10 billion AU$18 billion

That's, side by side, the FTTH, FTTH (revised), and the coalition's estimates.

Either the coalition is flat out lying through its teeth (and it could be lying about the whole thing to absolve itself of its responsibilities or to foreward any criticism -- its standard LNP/government policy to take over and make out that things were way worse than you could ever have dreamed)... or they're planning to sell a much worse service at a far higher cost, which means it doesn't even benefit the people who paid for it in the first place, the taxpayer.

Ideally you can deploy FTTN/VDSL without replacing anything, you'd have to get fiber out to these places otherwise, and often enough here (the US) its aerial cable.

Like I'd said in my original post, most of the places that would get fiber as part of an FTTN deployment have no fiber at all right now, so even getting the fiber into those areas is important to the later deployment of FTTP.

With pair bonding VDSL has the potential of more than 25 mbps - plus the speeds they can pull out of copper over less that 1000m loops is quite promising, and continues to improve.