[nikcub]

> I've been involved directly in two separate decisions over the last 5 years where US companies decided not to invest in product and operations launches Australia specifically because of the cost of bandwidth to residential users

Cost of bandwidth and last mile network are completely unrelated. Australian bandwidth is the most expensive in the world because it is poorly peered mostly one-way expensive transit.

You could install gigabit to every home tomorrow and you'd still have 100GB download caps because an international link is $25/Mbps+

I find a lot of people confuse these issues, which is unfortunate because all of this NBN energy directed towards the price of Australian bandwidth could actually fix something tangible.

[deadlyllama]

Really? NZ is in a similar situation and I can buy an unlimited 1Gbps residential fibre connection in a town of 43,000 people for NZD115/month.

NBN handover charges are excessive, and interconnecting with Telstra is crazy expensive, and you need to for good domestic connectivity. The NZ UFB fibre network has much lower handover costs, and the incumbent telco here is marginally more reasonable.

[ctphipps]

I'd take good domestic bandwidth as a good (albeit primitive) first start. Overseas bandwidth/peering can be a commercial next step - if the last mile and domestic bandwidth is the bottleneck then there's no catalyst to kick-start international connectivity negotiations.

Let me run a stable FaceTime chat from Canberra to Sydney. Then let's worry about Canberra to Los Angeles...