Those data rates are more frightening for RIAA and its friends than for little kids...

International links are a bottleneck everywhere, which is why people have devised clever ways around them. Seriously popular content is cached by transparent proxies or Content Delivery Networks such as Akamai which reside inside your high-speed network. Also, having a national high-speed network in a country with plenty of space will be very attractive to tech investors to actually move their data to Australia, bringing the data to you instead of having to pull it in from abroad.

Do not underestimate the capacity of DWDM backbones. Also, realize that this gigabit speed is peak capacity, users will scarcely use this capacity for extended periods of time. I also expect that subscriptions will be differentiated with the 1G subscription being more expensive than less demanding plans. 100Mbps will be plenty for most users, but it would be great if customers with higher demands willing to pay the price could get a higher speed.

Tony Abbott apparently doesn't understand a thing about modern networking. Today's optic fibers can support frightening data rates, the limiting factor currenly is what the hardware on both sides is capable of. With the speeds of the high end of the market recently increasing to 40G and 100G (from 1G and 10G) per channel I would not be surprised if that jump suddenly made 1G FTTH possible. Investing in copper technology now is outrageous and a waste of money. Utilizing it for the last mile while you're not done rolling out fiber to each premise is acceptable at best. Wireless broadband might be acceptable for remote locations but even those base stations need a good fiber connection for their uplink.

Tanenbaum is not, was not and never will be Torvalds' "prof". Torvalds never studied at the Vrije Universiteit and the two only met on comp.os.minix after Linus released his first kernel.

Some newsgroup I regularly read got a lot of spam over the last month or so, but a couple days ago it just stopped. Possibly related...