"We're moving ahead but the aim is to ... get this done in the next few months," Mr Turnbull said. "Certainly by the middle of the year." Mr Turnbull added that both parties were moving "quickly" and that there was "a lot of agreement". "The parties are not miles apart, they're very close to each other. There's a meeting of minds and it's just a question of making sure that the detailed work is done properly." The current Telstra deal took the Labor government and NBN Co more than two years to negotiate. On January 14, Telstra chief executive David Thodey said the telco had not yet kicked off renewed negotiations. At the NBN Co half-year financial results release on Friday, the company said it would be ready to begin rolling out the Coalition's optimised multi-technology network design from 2015. It said it had also begun preliminary discussions with Optus.

Mr Turnbull had previously said Telstra wouldn't receive a cent more from the government in a new deal. "I'm very confident that we can acquire access, ownership if you like, of the last mile copper for no additional payment," he told Sky News in August last year. Mr Turnbull has commissioned a number of reviews of the project, with a cost-benefit analysis also due mid-year. Among other things, the government's NBN Co will need to alter the $11 billion agreement with Telstra so that it doesn't disconnect copper lines as fibre is connected. For a majority of connections, the Coalition is now changing the NBN from a fibre-to- the-premises network to a fibre-to-the-node one, and will use Telstra's copper for the "last-mile" connection.

Mr Turnbull also defended the Coalition government reneging on its election promise to deliver minimum 25 megabits per second download speeds to all Australians by 2016. He partly blamed the Labor government for not being "transparent" about progress of the NBN rollout. "What I said in the lead up to the election was that our goal was to ensure that everybody had access to at least 25 megs [download speeds] by … [the] end of 2016," Mr Turnbull said. "This assumed of course that the fixed-wireless and satellite performed as promised." But he said there wasn't "a lot of transparency on that" from the Labor government. Therefore, he said, in the Strategic Review "the NBN Co's best estimate — people might say it's a conservative estimate — is that they will not be able to achieve that by 2016", Mr Turnbull said. "But [NBN Co] will nonetheless by 2019 — which is the second part of our goal — ensure that over 90 per cent of the fixed-line footprint has 50 megs or better. It's really just a question of practicality."

Mr Turnbull also blamed Labor for the NBN roll-out being delayed "The NBN is a project that sadly had run off the rails and getting it back on the rails and moving again is obviously going to take, so [NBN Co] believe, somewhat longer than we had anticipated." Removal of 'unnecessary regulation' Later on Thursday, Mr Turnbull indicated at an annual Internet Industry Association dinner in Sydney that he expected about 280 pages of regulation would be repealed from the communications portfolio alone as part of the Abbott government's crackdown on what it believes to be unnecessary regulation. "This overhaul will start next month, when we have our first regulation repeal day," Mr Turnbull said.

He said the Australian Communications and Media Authority chairman, Chris Chapman, had embraced the removal of so-called red tape "with a passion". "He knows the heavy burden of regulation and is determined to cut as much of it away," Mr Turnbull said. "Even the regulator is a passionate deregulator," he added. This reporter is on Facebook: /bengrubb Follow IT Pro on Twitter