Enter the NBN. Instead of allowing companies to use their corporate initiative to service their different markets as cost-effectively as possible with whatever technologies were approrpiate, the Government of the day (no names, I'm trying to not turn this into a political discussion) decided that the NBN must use fibre where possible and service all Australians for the same price regardless of where they live. So it builds a massive new monopoly, paid for by the Australian taxpayer and as cost-effectively as all government-owned organisations do. A later Government decided that the NBN had bitten off way more than it could chew but couldn't back out of its contracts and now we're left with a bastard hybrid where the NBN has to pay Telstra for use of the copper where higher speed access mechanisms aren't cost-effective.
My interpretation of what happened.
They actually tried the competing company model before. It ended up with a patchwork of streets where you could get fast internet from one of two companies while other streets did not get anything. And then one company gave up due to losses while the other stopped expanding.
So the government decides one network that any ISP would be able to connect to is the way forward. They look to leverage the current network and find the company wants to charge too much and so they will need to do a new network. They look at what it will cost to build the new network and the cost of laying new fibre is not that much more then laying new copper. They also try to negotiate with the existing company and one of the companies conditions was they would have excluse access to it.
They do negotiate to use the current ducts and they start building the backbone and the government changes.
The new government decides no matter what we can't use fibre and they negeotiate a new deal to use the existing copper instead(unlike the previous government who realized it was a bad deal). In fact the current system will actually lay new copper instead of fibre.
From a technological and long term financial perspective NBN definitely made mistakes! FTTN is an already obsolete technology on an ancient copper network but I'm just grateful that I'm not on Fixed Wireless, they have it really rough!
We were on 1MB ADSL on a good day. We now have a decent 25MB fixed wireless connection which is so much better.
I think the stories about fixed wireless are people who were in the fixed line area who were moved to fixed wireless.