>And isn't the NBN currently ripping out the FttN, replacing it with FttP, at no cost to the cusytomer? Sounds like a major upgrade to me.

In select areas, some of which are currently served by third party fibre providers, who can provide up to 10G, who now will be forbidden to pipe in to new non business customer dwellings.

>And wasn't the reason we got the NBN that Telstra point blank refused to replace the monopoly copper infrastructure with fibre?

Right, a single giant telco monopoly is bad. Instead of removing the monopoly we built a new monopoly and tipped money in.

>If I didn't know better, I'd be think the major policy mistake Australia made in Telecom was the liberals to selling off Telstra.

They sold it off AND enforced ULL. Its the same thing, monopoly is forced to be better, still lagging behind competitive markets.

>In a competitive market when a new technology came along a telecom is forced to upgrade because their a competitors would use the new technology to steal their customers.

Right see my comment about the singapore model, where they just rent glass instead of a service.

>That works fabulously for 5G, where there is competition.

In the cities we had ADSL2+ competing with HFC and Fixed Wireless. The only monopoly was Telstras, who prevented people running residential fibre in their pit and pipe asset. HFC was a hack to use overhead wires because people could not use pit and pipe. That asset has been gifted to NBNCo who also have a legislative monopoly and also dont play nice.

> absurd situation of having buildings full of federal court judges and lawyers fighting to get reasonable ULL access.

Yeah there were a few instances of them fighting it. Which is another reason why monopolies are bad.

>But replacing the wires themselves - never.

Happened all the time. Actually they negotiated a shutdown due to NBNCo, certain copper services were simply stamped beyond economical repair and Telstra could choose to simply cancel services as part of the deal. I think you are upset about the customer owned piece of copper from the demarc in, which most residents would never upgrade.

>Desperate to make the obvious move to fibre, the Libs then offered Telstra, the Optus, then anybody money to build a new fibre network - but they all refused to do so unless the government effectively guaranteed monopoly ownership over the new network.

No one wants to commit to a national scale rollout of fibre. But many people are happy to roll out community and metro scale fibre. The key is open access. When you have a restricted pit and pipe asset, there can only be one provider. But funnily enough, commercial properties like housing estates and apartment buildings dont give a shit and let people come through and overbuild the NBN. TPG had to take NBN co to court and NBN withdrew rather than risking the rest of their monopoly.

>Oh, that's right, public ownership shared natural monopolies like wires, roads, water mains is bad. The thing I missed is why a private rent extracting monopoly beholden to no one except the profit seeking share holders owning those things is better.

My point is that common carrier sucks. If you instead made the pit and pipe asset the common resource, there would be little to no issue. Or just run glass like Singapore.