[jbarham]

Bingo. I'm in Melbourne and have founded/co-founded three online businesses, and have exactly zero servers in Australia. Even if I could have 1 Gb fiber with the NBN tomorrow, that wouldn't change.

IMHO the Australian government would be better off expanding international network capacity to Australia across the Pacific and up to Asia. It's absurd to hear non-technical politicians arguing over which NBN architecture is better. That shouldn't be their job any more than deciding whether I use Python or PHP.

[gregsq]

Agreed. My servers are in the UK where the market I'm dealing with is, and where I live usually. Even setting up edge servers for an Australian company starts in the US or UK for me, and comes back over the sea pipes to Australia. When I'm in Australia my Netflix comes over fine through a server I proxy through. The vast majority of consumers will never need the maximum bandwidth, many will hit cap limits earlier, and for latency reasons there's good reasons for keeping servers close to viable markets.

I really don't think Australian politicians know enough about this subject, and that may include the PM's Mr Internet, Malcolm Turnball.