This is massively important to the residents of Australia who do not live in major cities, who contribute professionally, who consume and educate digitally, and require health services on par with those who DO live in major cities. The people in the fixed-wireless internet wasteland will never get more than 25mb/s access, where others enjoy 1000mb/s an up, given there is no current limitation on Optic Fibre. For the hundreds of thousands of people who live in semi-regional areas, tte copper cable is eroding just as fast as those who live in major towns, if not more so, and their reliance on such infrastructure for communications is fast becoming an un-reality. In my region where we have been earmarked for fixed wireless, we are less than 8kms from a town that is getting fibre, and thus remain a candidate for a "fibre extension". However, when asked how much the community would have to come to the party with, the response was $1.5 million, a sum greatly out of our reach. However, what remains the issue, is we do not have any knowledge as to how those funds would be appropriated. The cost of ACTUAL materials appear to be 4% of the NBNs 40bn budget, which means that a lot of the money is spent (wasted) on manpower. When we asked the NBN to provide us a breakdown so we may be able to rally as a community (see their charter) and mitigate the gross expenditure so that we can secure internet freedom for the next 30 years we were told that we are not privy to such information and that we wold have to foot the bill, or miss out. This does not help our community at all (see their charter) and in fact creates a divided nation.

We need to know how our community can mitigate or offset the extravagant cost attributed to our area so we can all pitch in and get the job done.

We believe all communities armed with this knowledge can achieve internet parity with the city dwellers, and retain the value in their homes and contribution to society.