Australia's national broadband network, the NBN, will not return a profit on the billions invested in the project, a new report from credit ratings agency Standard & Poor's says.

Broadband Forum's latest "BASE" event brought together a vast array of speakers, covering an unparalleled range of topics, from NG-PON2 and Gfast to virtualisation and converged networks for 5G, with more than 300 delegates "from the entire value chain".

Controversy and questions about broadband speed and performance aside, NBN Co, the company building the National Broadband Network, has today released its 2016 financial results and says it has exceeded connection and financial targets for the ninth consecutive quarter. And, the project is “on track”, with the NBN footprint now extended to 2.9 million premises, with 1.1 million connected.