I was listening to an episode of BBC Click, and they were covering the B4RN project in the UK. It's a kick a** rural fibre network rolled out by the people at a fraction of the cost BT can do it for.

Each house gets 2 fibres (for redundancy) and a Gb connection. Users that were on dialup are getting 600Mb/s. 

This is seriously interesting, I'm sure NZ is too sparsely populated to make it worth while here, but it certainly gets you thinking...