NBN on Thursday launched its first satellite, which from April 2016 will provide broadband coverage to up to 400,000 Australians living in rural and remote areas.
Customers can expect to receive 25 Mbps downlink and 5 Mbps uplink connection speeds.
"We expect between 220,000 and 240,000 end users to sign up for the NBN satellite service. The take-up rate will depend on a number of factors including the prices charged by retail service providers (RSPs)," explained Matt Dawson, NBN’s satellite director, in an email to Total Telecom.
The satellite, called Sky Muster, will undergo technical tests during the coming months, with a view to launching commercial, nationwide services in April 2016. Daws on said NBN has not begun negotiating deals with RSPs, but he expects "all of our major RSP customers to sign up."
He said retail operators will likely start announcing price plans from March.
When complete, NBN’s A$1.8 billion satellite programme will consist of two satellites with a combined capacity of 135 Gbps, and 10 ground stations. The cost per premises works out at A$8,000, which is expensive but less costly than rolling out terrestrial networks to sparsely-populated parts of Australia.
"The new service will offer a great service at a competitive price," Dawson insisted.
"Interestingly, rural Australia contains many people who are amongst the country’s biggest wealth generators in the farming and mining sectors. Many of them are already paying substantial charges for either mobile broadband or existing and lesser-quality satellite broadband," he noted.
"Even for lower-income people, the NBN satellite service will offer a great service for a very competitive price," he said.
Dawson added that RSPs will offer tiered levels of service, "from light packages aimed at those who just want to check emails and do light Web browsing, to higher-end, more data-heavy packages that will cater to those who want to stream and do more OTT video."
With its new satellite, NBN will look to move on from its troubled interim satellite service.
Under the previous government, NBN rented A$352 million worth of satellite capacity to provide coverage to around 250,000 people living in remote areas.
However, despite covering a quarter of a million people, NBN only had sufficient capacity to provide service to 48,000. That limit was reached in December and NBN stopped taking new orders. Those that did get service experienced speeds equivalent to dial-up Internet.
In July 2014, NBN partnered with Thaicom subsidiary IP Star, which agreed to provide wholesale and retail satellite broadband serv ices to a further 9,000 rural premises.
NBN’s new satellite "will help to close the divide and ensure no-one gets left behind," said NBN CEO Bill Morrow, in a statement.
"The ability to video-conference friends and family, study courses online and visit doctors from your lounge room will all be possible in areas which have traditionally struggled to access basic internet," he continued. "We’re one step closer to changing the digital face of our nation."
