The National Broadband Network (NBN) is probably the most important Australian public infrastructure project we will see in our lifetime. It offers huge potential social & economic benefits, and a future-proof technology: optical fibre to the premises (FTTP), with a working lifetime of 30 to 50 years, capable of progressive upgrading to support access speeds of 100 Gbps and above. Furthermore FTTP has been demonstrated to be much 'greener', in terms of requiring much less greenhouse gas emissions to power its operation, than the access technologies currently employed to provide broadband access, namely FTTN, ADSL or mobile wireless (Balliger et al., 2011).