Haven't read the whole paper yet, but below 600 Mbit/s is implied as being "Slow Internet" in the intro.
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.
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.