iTWire has previously commented on Malcolm Turnbull’s little trick of lowering expectations for the NBN, then making a big deal of the fact that those expectations have been exceeded. Labor did the same.

NBN has announced its annual financial results. It presents these as if it is a public company, instead of a government-owned enterprise, but the useful information is not the money but the number of connections. They are, as you might expect, accelerating.

CEO Bill Morrow said: “NBN has not only met its targets; it has exceeded them. The achievements of the past 12 months – including the recent regulatory approval of the Telstra agreement and the draft approval of the Optus deal – give us confidence that we can continue to accelerate the build.

“This will help us to meet our goal of ensuring that every home and business in Australia can receive fast broadband by 2020 so we can spur the digital economy and close the digital divide.

“These achievements come as a direct result of refinements we have made to the organisation, including improved business processes, the resetting of relations with our delivery partners and increasing employee morale.” He neglected to mention the bit about lowering the targets.

In the 12 months to 30 June 2015 the number of premises that can order an NBN service more than doubled from 553,000 premises to 1.2 million. That means we are about one-eighth of the way there.

The number of homes and businesses with an active NBN service more than doubled from 210,000 to 486,000 in the last financial year. Telecommunications revenues more than doubled from $60 million to $161 million, contributing to increase in average revenue per user (ARPU) from $37 to $40 per month and an increase in capital expenditure to $3.3 billion in line with the expansion of the rollout.

NBN has now received a $13.2 billion in equity funding from the Government. That figure is capped at $29.5 billion NBN and the Government hope that revenue will start to flow more strongly and that the organisation can become cashflow positive before that figures is reached.

Morrow said the NBN was well advanced in its transition to the ‘multi technology model’ of mixed delivery media, delivering the oft repeated talking point that this will enable Australians to receive fast broadband as soon as possible and at least cost to taxpayers.

It is an echo of Malcolm Turnbull’s pre-election promise that the Coalition would deliver an NBN sooner and cheaper than Labor’s fibre-to-the-home (FTTH), with an insignificant drop in performance from using fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) and employing the Telstra and Optus hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) cable networks, originally installed in the 1990s to deliver pay TV.

Morrow outline the significant achievements of the past 12 months:

All conditions for the revised Definitive Agreements between NBN and Telstra have been satisfied or waived. The ACCC has also delivered a draft decision approving NBN’s plans to integrate parts of Optus’s HHFC cable network and to progressively migrate its HFC customers onto the NBN network

NBN carried out the commercial launch of its fibre-to-the-building FTTB) product, and completed construction for the first 200,000 FTTN premises, which will be activated progressively from the current quarter onwards

The company conducted a successful trial of HFC technology, procured HFC equipment and outlined a blueprint to upgrade the entire HFC footprint to the DOCSIS 3.1 standard.

The first of the two dedicated NBN satellites have passed all testing procedures and are scheduled for launch on 1 October 2015, with commercial services scheduled to come online progressively from the second half of 2016.

NBN has continued to expand its fixed wireless footprint and piloted the delivery of wholesale speeds of up to 50 Mbps to users - up to double the original wholesale offering. A full commercial launch of the expanded offering is scheduled for the end of 2015.

All good news. But we still don’t know when it will be finished or how much it will cost. And we will never know if Malcolm Turnbull’s ‘multi technology mix’ will in fact end up being delivered cheaper and quicker than what Labor had promised.

What we do know is that the price of the Turnbull version will be higher than he promised (that is on the record), and that it will take longer to deliver than he promised (that is on the record). We also know that he exaggerated his claims of the cost of the Labor model (that is on the record).

But we must not be churlish. All of that is of no concern to the current team at NBN. They working hard on delivering what the Government has ordered, and things are on target. We know that, because they have told us so.