I'm always amazed by this. I live in Vietnam, out of town on a rural road, and I get a solid 60mb connection for both mobile and wired. It's dirt cheap - something like $15 a month for both. Why can't rich countries like Australia manage this? I know population density factors in, but we're not talking about getting data in the outback - just where people actually live.
Because "just where people live" is still a pretty enormous area and there simply isn't political will to build it out properly (See the original NBN FTTH vs the current FTTN rollout).
A lot of the existing infrastructure is very poorly maintained but due to Telstra being privatised back in the 90's but still owning the infrastructure (Under their Wholesale division) the government essentially still has to pay them a fuckton of money to put any new cables in the ground using "Their" conduits.
Our government decided to make our internet infrastructure political rather than choosing what was best for the nation. The right-wing party saw no need for fiber internet, and our left-wing party wanted a proper fiber infrastructure. Australia is massive, and was in dire need of a national infrastructure upgrade.
Rupert Murdoch (who owns Foxtel and a large number of newspapers) is highly right-wing and heavily supported the right-wing government. That government has been changed out since then, but we're left with the lasting effects of their decisions.
