National broadband: De-bottlenecking or doubling down?

It's front-page news every day: the private sector profit motive wrestling with political will and choices. Is National broadband -- to the tune of 100 Mb/s download speeds for almost everyone -- a natural end point for the country's future competitive infrastructure (so just be patient) or is it a basic citizen's right that is being inefficiently withheld due to telco incompetence and greed (so let's implement Big Bang now)?

In the end, we would all agree that it's in the public interest to improve national competitiveness, make e-health care and e-education a broader reality, close the digital divides related to poverty as well as differential coverage economics, and thereby release all the flow-through benefits for a true 21st century economy. In the end, leveraging a high-profile national broadband agenda to de-bottleneck the global infrastructure for communications is clearly a worthy goal, but doubling down on this public policy objective without a proper "strategy" may lead to unintended uncertainty and fiscal waste. Happily, there are examples of how private-public collaboration in this area can effect real change with less partisan rancor (France comes to mind). The national stakes here are too high not to focus on problem-solving versus pure posturing.