Exactly. I used to get 800+mbps speedtests from my Singapore NBN equivalent connection, which is great, but that's to a university speedtest node within the country, and just like every GPON network it's a burst rate that doesn't take into account overall utilization due to the shared OLT optical branch. What the providers did was to rate limit international transit based on your plan, and that's what meant anything at all.
After you have downloaded a few ISO files from inside the country, there isn't much local content left to use that local bandwidth on. To be fair, it is useful if you have some local friends who you want to be able to stream your content but it's also the sort of metric that leads to getting rated much higher in international bandwidth ratings than a country like Australia which is constrained to technologies that don't offer that sort of bandwidth in rural areas, whereas Singapore is a country of high-rise buildings that are all effectively within a metro area, with fibre run to basements and then distributed throughout the building from there.
How will you ever compete with that? You could have 10Gbps to the premises for 60% of Australia and you'd probably still end up with a worse metric based on the fact that we have (international - from EU/US) distance, population, population density and rural constraints that a lot of the high-ranking asian countries on the list don't content with, hence why the bandwidth rankings are utterly useless for real world comparison.
Sure, all it would take us for we taxpayers to fund it for another decade to profitability, so people who don't use the extra bandwidth can say they have it. What exactly can't be done on today's NBN broadband connections that would suddenly be unlocked for a large proportion of the population if this were done? Surely there's a need to justify the expenditure of public money just to..... boost our international bandwidth rating credentials?
