Australia is one of those countries where regulators heavily lobbied by the fiber industry initially bought into the myth of the viability of "fiber everywhere," making fiber the central focus of the country's initial National Broadband Network (NBN) plans.

Being the world's largest government subsidized broadband project, the NGN is truly a "bellweather" worth watching. They have since learned a very valuable lesson that can be beneficial to operators and governments around the world.

According to the Strategic Review of the National Broadband Network, published in December 2013:

"This is not a question of fibre versus copper. The key issue is only how far fibre optics are pushed out into the network and whether they must reach into every home and every business or, whether existing copper infrastructure can be used for the last few hundred metres and in so doing save much time, inconvenience and many billions of dollars."

The Hon Malcolm Turnbull, MP
Minister of Communications

Service operators are struggling to find cost effective solutions to enable them to offer faster broadband to their residential and SME customers before losing business to competitors.  

FTTH/B cannot be justified everywhere.   

Moreover service providers worldwide indicate that although FTTH is a solution that they will continue to deploy it would not be THE solutions for the large BB deployments in the next years.

Service operators are looking to optimize utilization of their current broadband infrastructure in order to close the bandwidth gap and offer residential and SME customer's services that can cost effectively compete against the cable companies offering. A common target among fix line service operators is an offering of dedicated 100 Mbps downstream and significant upstream.