This appeared last week.
Elon Musk’s Starlink global internet creeps onto NBN’s turf
Dec 29, 2021 – 5.00am
Early one morning, Nick Guzowski was looking up at the stars on his rural property in the Wollondilly Shire when he noticed a constellation of satellites moving swiftly through the dawn sky.
It wasn’t until he got back to Sydney, and to a strong internet connection, that he began his research into Starlink, the global internet company founded by Elon Musk that has launched more than 1600 satellites in low-orbital zones to provide fast, reliable internet to remote places.
Until the 2019 bushfires tore through the Wollondilly Shire, Guzowski and his family had used the NBN’s Sky Muster satellites to receive internet access to their rural property.
After signing up to Starlink’s beta rollout and forking out $809, a Starlink satellite pack arrived at Guzowski’s property in November, in the form of a medium-sized box, a dish, and a set of pictorial instructions.
“It took less than thirty seconds to install,” Guzowski says. “I just unpacked it and plugged it into the power.”
Once electricity reached the dish, it swivelled itself to find the closest Starlink satellite, and suddenly, he had internet speeds of roughly 320 Mbps.
Bringing quality internet to the Australian country has never been more important. As COVID-19 swept through the eastern seaboard this year, locking down major cities and forcing remote work, a wave of people and their families headed for the bush.
Every month, more people like Guzowski are signing up to Musk’s Starlink that has been making moves into rural areas, marking a serious competitive threat to the government-owned NBN Co.
NBN Co has an explicit mandate to connect regional Australia through its fibre-to-the-premise broadband network, and via its two Sky Muster satellites, which were launched first in 2015 and then in 2016, costing about $100 million each.
While intensely secretive, Starlink’s current rollout is understood to be gathering pace with more than 100,000 users on its beta services across 12 countries, including Australia and New Zealand.
Telecommunications company Vocus Group is assisting with the 20 Starlink base stations already operating in Australia, and the six in New Zealand.
Regional properties such as the Guzowski’s have been snapping up the $809 dish and signing up to the $139 a month ongoing subscription fee for the advertised speeds between 50Mbps and 150Mbps.
But thanks to relatively little traffic on the network, speeds are reaching a healthy 320Mbps, which are likely to fall as more people join the network.
Competitive threat
While Starlink is causing waves among regional households, it’s unclear whether the NBN is bracing for the threat of Starlink’s full commercial arrival, expected within 18 months.
“If the proposition is that this kind of fundamentally high-cost alternatives represent some kind of existential threat to the NBN’s core plumbing, then I’m not sure that I’d subscribe to that kind of viewpoint,” Gavin Williams, NBN Co’s chief development officer, regional and remote, tells AFR Weekend.
“We’re talking about a service that’s not even a service yet, and our position as a statutory infrastructure provider is we’re not gamblers, we’re about providing fast reliable broadband.”
Height makes the difference
The fundamental difference between the NBN’s Sky Muster satellites and Starlink’s satellites is height. NBN’s Sky Muster is a geostationary orbit satellite, or GEO, meaning it sits 35,000 kilometres from the ground, covers a larger area but takes longer to ping signals from households or businesses.
Starlink’s satellites, on the other hand, are low earth orbit satellites, or LEOs, which sit about 300 kilometres from the ground, so they relay messages faster, but need more satellites to cover the same surface area.
In terms of download speeds, while Starlink’s Australian LEO services are advertising speeds between 50Mbps and 150Mbps, NBN Co’s Sky Muster’s top speed is a comparatively sluggish 25Mbps.
The NBN, whose revenue surged 20 per jump to $4.6 billion in the year ended June 30 but which found residential revenue has stalled, has earmarked $2 billion out of its $4.5 billion corporate plan to double down on evolving technology in the bush.
But as it stands, that technology is set to remain partly focused on the Sky Musters, which have connected about 112,000 premises with another 400,000 ready to connect.
“We intend to push every ounce of capability out of our satellite assets and when those assets retire in 10 years or so, we’ll be looking to embrace whatever the appropriate technology is then,” Mr Williams says.
LEO threat to NBN only set to grow
The other part of the NBN’s rural strategy is to keep building fibre-to-the-premise connections in small towns, taking the traffic off the Sky Muster satellite and freeing up capacity. Lastly, it plans to compete on price, which it does through heavily government-subsidised offerings in the regions.
“Not everyone can afford new technologies in the bush, so we aim to be that low-cost provider,” Mr Williams says.
But at the heart of any debate about internet connectivity is just that, connectivity, and experts say the Starlink offering is ultimately superior.
“This is very serious for the NBN,” Paul Budde, a telecommunications consultant, says.
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Starlink always looked like a threat to any terrestrial internet provision but this has really come up to serious reality very quickly!
To me the real lesson here is that you can’t trust the boffins not to render major tech investments rather unsafe if you plan on not making the return on investment you require over a period longer that 3-5 years – and that is not long!
Frankly it looks like Starlink hold all the aces over the NBN – save a Government intervention to make its use illegal – and I am not sure even Mr. Morrison would go that far!
David.
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