Ultimately I think Internet access will reach utility status (like water, electricity, telephony), meaning it will be a given (in the developed world at least and hopefully more and more of the developing world as time goes on).

It's still priced as a premium product and there's no reason for this other than regional monopolies over the last mile.

The one thing that confuses me about the France proposal is how they plan on building this for 20B euros when the NBN in Australia is estimated to cost A$36B [1] for a country with one third the population of France.

The biggest cost in any communications network is the last mile so is proportional to population but inversely proportional to population density. Population density is low in Australia but there is 1/3 of the people.

Additionally, there are significant regional infrastructure costs. It is more expensive per mile to build fibre in, say, New York City versus Tennessee.

Inter-city links are really a small part of the total cost, even in a country as spread out as Australia (given the size, the population is 95% on the coast).

Hopefully the NBN in Australia (which I'm a big supporter of) will survive the next election. The Opposition is sadly against it and the present government is hanging on by a thread and in leadership turmoil.

For those not from Australia, the current Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, became PM after ousting Kevin Rudd in a partyroom coup d'etat in Rudd's first term, something with little precedent in Australian politics and certainly not in a PM's first term. For example, then-Treasurer Paul Keating ousted fourth-term PM Bob Hawke in much the same way.

This sort of thing isn't generally favoured the electorate because (IMHO) it's perceived as the Number 2 saying "it's my turn to be Number 1" yet it plagues politics (Hawke-Keating, Howard-Costello, Blair-Brown in the UK, etc). Keating went on to narrowly win the "unwinnable" 1993 election and then get destroyed in 1996.

Gillard narrowly won the last election with a minority in the House of Representatives [2]. Who became PM came down to horse-trading with minor parties and independents such that the change of a single seat changes the government. Obviously this is not a stable situation.

Anyway, things look grim for the Gillard government as Kevin Rudd won't go away. He has already failed (twice?) to take back the top job in a partyroom ballot and the issue is rearing its ugly head again.

Tony Abbott (the Opposition leader) has campaigned on a half-assed cheaper version of the NBN that is basically the same ADSL system for most people. Technically the proposal is FTTN (fibre to the node) where nodes are within 1.5km of premises and copper the rest of the way, which should improve bandwidth (ADSL2+ can do about 12Mbps at 1.5km and VDSL/VDSL2 could potentially raise that).

The worst thing for Australian broadband (IMHO) would be for the NBN to be gutted in this nascent stage but it could happen if the Opposition wins big in the next election.

Luckily for the NBN, the National Party, which notionally represents "rural" interests, the traditional party of the Liberal Party, is in favour of the NBN because current (and proposed) broadband solutions for rural areas suck hard.

Now all we need is non-backwards reasonably priced broadband in the United States. We can but hope.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillard_Government#Minority_gov...