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600 technicians to travel Australia connecting remote premises to Sky Muster broadband network.
Australia’s NBN on Friday announced the commercial launch of its wholesale satellite broadband service.
Called Sky Muster, the network covers 400,000 people in rural and remote areas, and can support connection speeds of up to 25 Mbps on the downlink and 5 Mbps on the uplink. The commercial launch follows successful live trials with 200 households.
"The NBN Sky Muster satellite service will make a truly transformational difference to rural and remote Australians as we offer some of the world’s fastest and largest consumer satellite broadband plans to remote and isolated areas of Australia," said John Simon, NBN’s chief customer officer, in a statement.
Services will be sold by retail service providers (RSPs), but a field force of 600 NBN-trained engineers will go out and physically connect new customers to the service.
"It will take some time to get all eligible premises connected due to the sheer size of our 7.69 million km2 country, so we ask for patience as our teams travel around to install the service," Simon said.
The Sky Muster satellite blasted off in October 2015. It is the first of two satellites which together will have a combined capacity of 135 Gbps.
"Many of the places Sky Muster will connect to have virtually no access to broadband right now. To go from nothing to a high speed service will be a game changer for these places and the people that live there," said Jack Archer, CEO of the Regional Australia Institute (RAI).
Sky Muster replaces NBN’s troubled interim satellite service, which covered 250,000 eligible customers but only had capacity sufficient to connect 48,000. Once that limit was reached, NBN stopped taking new orders. Those that were able to sign up experienced connection speeds equivalent to dial-up Internet.
To ease the pressure, NBN partnered with Thaicom subsidiary IP Star, which agreed to provide wholesale and retail satellite services covering a further 9,000 rural premises.
