Interesting that this debate always centres on current bandwidth capability. I think the two biggest economic advantages of 'fibre to the home' are actually lower latency and future upgradability.
On latency, the round-trip time for a packet between Sydney and LA is about 2-3x slower than one would realisticly expect from the transmission medium. Why? It's the routing hops that introduce the additional latency. So it stands to reason that FTTH == fewer routing/repeating hops == lower latency. This is in contrast to 'fibre to the node', which requires additional routing hops, more resending and error correction, and, if you want to use fancy technologies like VDSL 'vectoring', more active processing of communications in transit (to calculate the correct cross-talk cancelling noise to push down all lines). In addition, wave-division multiplexing with latency at 99.7 per cent the speed of light in a vacuum has been achieved on fibre (admittedly in a lab/academic setting) over a distance of 310 metres (source: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.45).
Why is lower latency desirable, from a national economic perspective? Because it creates larger scope for distributed computation of non-parallel processing and higher IO for geographically distributed storage. So data-centres can be located on cheaper land, further away from the CBD. Perhaps in future it also means someone in Darwin could utilise the idling processor, or spare hard disk space, of someone in Sydney via something like Etherium. All of this becomes harder and less efficienct as latency creeps up. For general background, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Comp...
On future upgradability, I'd argue we're reaching the upper bandwidth limits of what copper can provide (as a real world, fixed line infrastructure). This seems to be around 100-150mbit non-symmetric under the most ideal conditions, using some pretty fancy tech (on both the carrier and consumer ends), although the hypothetical maximum is supposedly around 10Gbits (achievable in LANs, unlikely to be achievable in WANs with current copper assets). How long until this is not 'enough'? In contrast, for single strand fibre, NEC have achieved 101Tbit/s over 165km, and NTT 69.1 Tbit/s over 240km.
Cisco projects the volume of global IP traffic to grow at a compounding annualised growth rate of 23% between 2014 and 2019; in other words global IP traffic volume will triple in 5 years (source: http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-pr...). Keep in mind this is strictly global IP traffic. Alcatel-lucent and Bell Labs, factoring in 'metro' (non-backbone) traffic (e.g. office to datacentre, consumer to CDN), forecast a quadrupling of bandwidth volume between 2015 and 2020, with an apparently exponential growth rate (source: https://mc-11560-1882305812.us-east-1.elb.amazonaws.com/site...).
By opting to 'destroy' the original NBN, our government has knee-capped Australia's future economic prospects. Perhaps Lee Kuan Yew was right and Australia is destined to be the 'poor white-trash of Asia'.
