Haven't read the whole paper yet, but below 600 Mbit/s is implied as being "Slow Internet" in the intro.
It's simply not economical enough to lay fibre and put 5G masts everywhere (5G LTE bands covers less area due to being higher frequency, and so are also limited to being deployed in areas with a higher enough density to be economically justifiable).
I grew up with 2400 baud modems as the super fast upgrade, so talk of multiple gigabits for consumers is blowing my mind a bit.
I’m not sure whether it’s possible, but could you theoretically offload large file downloads to HTTP/2 to get best of both worlds?
Yes, you can! You’d have your websites on servers that support HTTP/3 and your large files on HTTP/2 servers, similar to how people put certain files on CDNs. It might well be a great solution!
Basically, the old copper lines were replaced by the NBN, which is a government-owned corporation that sells wholesale networking to telcos. Essentially, the government has a monopoly, providing the last-mile fibre links. They use nested VLANs to provide layer-2 access to the consumer telcos.
Where it got complicated was that the right-wing government was in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch, who threatened them with negative press before an upcoming election. They bent over and grabbed their ankles like the good little Christian school boys they are, and torpedoed the NBN network technology to protect the incumbent Fox cable network. Instead of fibre going to all premises, the NBN ended up with a mix of technologies, most of which don't scale to gigabit. It also took longer and cost more, despite the government responsible saying they were making these cuts to "save taxpayer money".
Also for political reasons, they were rolling it out starting at the sparse rural areas and leaving the high-density CBD regions till last. This made it look bad, because if they spent $40K digging up the long rural dirt roads to every individual farmhouse, it obviously won't have much of a return on the taxpayer's investment... like it would have if deployed to areas with technology companies and their staff.
Some existing smaller telcos noticed that there was a loophole in the regulation that allowed them to connect the more lucrative tech-savvy customers to their own private fibre if it's within 2km of an existing line. Companies like TPG had the entire CBD and inner suburban regions of every major city already 100% covered by this radius, so they proceeded to leapfrog the NBN and roll out their own 100 Mbps fibre-to-the-building service half a decade ahead. I saw their unmarked white vans stealthily rolling out extra fibre at like 3am to extend their coverage area before anyone in the government noticed.
The funny part was that FttB uses VDSL2 boxes in the basement for the last 100m going up to apartments, but you can only have one per building because they use active cross-talk cancellation. So by the time the NBN eventually got around to wiring the CBD regions, they got to the apartments to discover that "oops, too late", private telcos had gotten there first!
There were lawsuits... which the government lost. After all, they wrote the legislation, they were just mad that they hadn't actually understood it.
Meanwhile, some other incumbent fibre providers that should have disappeared persisted like a stubborn cockroach infestation. I've just moved to an apartment serviced by OptiComm, which has 1.1 out of 5 stars on Google... which should tell you something. They even have a grey fibre box that looks identical to the NBNCo box except it's labelled LBNCo with the same font so that during a whirlwind apartment inspection you might not notice that you're not going to be on the same high-speed Internet as the rest of the country.
Most importantly, it can be heavily over-provisioned for peanuts, so your cable is future-proof, and you will never have dig the same trenches again.
Copper only makes sense if you already have it.
The history there is that Australia used to have a government run monopoly on telephone infrastructure and services (Telecom Australia), which was later privatised (and rebranded to Telstra). The privatisation left Telstra with a monopoly on the infrastructure, but also a requirement that they resell the last mile at a reasonable rate to allow for some competition.
So Australia already had an existing industry of ISPs that were already buying last mile access from someone else. The NBN was just a continuation of the existing status quo in that regard.
> They even have a grey fibre box that looks identical to the NBNCo box except it's labelled LBNCo with the same font
Early in my career I worked for one of those smaller telcos trying to race to get services into buildings before the NBN. I left around the time they were talking about introducing an LBNCo brand (only one of the reasons I left). At the time, they weren't part of Opticomm, but did partner with them in a few locations. If the brand is still around, I guess they must have been acquired at some point.
E.g.: 8K 60 fps video streaming benefits from data rates up to about 1 Gbps in a noticeable way, but that's at least a decade away form mainstream availability.
But telcos have colossal copper networks, and they want to milk the last dollars from it before it has to be replaced, with digging and all. Hence price segmenting, with slower "copper" plans and premium "fiber" plans, obviously no matter if the building has fiber already.
Also, passive fiber interconnects have much higher losses than copper with RJ45s. This means you want to have no more than 2-3 connectors between pieces of active equipment, including from ISP to a building. This requires more careful planning, and this is why wiring past the apartment (or even office floor or a single-family house) level is usually copper Ethernet.
And internal network is 1 Gbit too. So it'll take ) and cost) more than just changing my subscription.
Also my TV is still 1080p lol