Australia’s vast tracts of regional and remote mobile reception and broadband blackspots could soon have a new suitor for government-subsidised services in areas deemed by traditional carriers as economically unviable.
The senate estimates environment and communications legislation committee has been told telecommunications authorities are sniffing around constellations of Low Earth Orbiting Satellites (LEOS) as a potential fix for the enduring problem, after questions about whether Elon Musk’s Starlink service had come onto their radar.
The rapid maturation of LEOS — like Starlink — in the Australian telecommunication market is a gamechanger because the technology can provide effective total coverage of very large areas that have traditionally been serviced by a patchy mix of microwave, directed satellite and fixed wireless technologies to create an access footprint.
But LEOS also have the potential to leapfrog existing solutions that have attracted billions of dollars in federal subsidies under various blackspot-elimination programs, and Telstra’s infamous Universal Service Obligation (USO) — regulation placed upon the carrier after it was privatised to ensure it won’t pull out its services in the same way banks are shuttering branches and deserting country towns.
The USO got even more complicated after the creation of the optical fibre-based National Broadband Network because the new government-owned carrier essentially bounced Telstra out of the wholesale telecommunications market under structural separation.
What the NBN has since struggled to deliver is regional and remote services comparable to metro areas with various stop-gap solutions like the SkyMuster satellite service delivering the slowest NBN minimum speeds of just 12mbps because of constrained capacity and finite shared bandwidth that requires data caps.
The Nationals have a particularly keen interest in what the NBN is not delivering for their regional constituents, partly because they are in opposition and the NBN was a Labor conceived project, but more because rapid digitisation of services has left large parts of the bush with internet and mobile connections that just don’t keep up.
Tony Abbott had wanted to “demolish” the NBN when he took office in 2013, but realised the Nationals would probably demolish him first if he tried, and thus the USO subsidies have continued to flow evermore with questionable efficacy.
Nationals senator Ross Cadell on Wednesday didn’t seem to care much about the bygone days of particle politics (photons vs electrons or copper vs fibre), but surprised communications officials when he peppered them with questions about when or if the bush will ever get Starlink.
“It certainly offers opportunities, the minister established a Low Earth Orbit Satellite Working Group, ostensibly with the purpose of us exploring and understanding what the possibilities that satellites offer, what those possibilities might be,” deputy secretary for the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications and the Arts, Richard Windeyer said.
Cadell was interested in whether the infamous latency — lagginess — of traditional satellite connections might be fixed, so he can enjoy gaming on par with folks in the big smoke.
“I think your point about lag or latency is one that’s long-standing when people talk about satellites. That’s where low Earth orbiting satellites [have] got the opportunity to possibly change the game a bit. So we’re very interested in how those unfold,” Windeyer said.
“We’ve got low Earth orbiting satellite providers making quite significant promises or statements about the capability of those of those constellations including the ability to, in due course deliver services direct to a mobile phone handset.”
That last statement is likely to send a few shudders through incumbent subsidised mobile providers that have successfully lobbied for years to either be allowed to maintain a basic monopoly or leave the playing field by way of release from USOs.
It could also become a horror show for the NBN. If the public monopoly pushes to keep Starlink and its resellers off its turf it will be characterised as a dog-in-the-manger play. If it acquiesces and lets Starlink in, it could render a lot of the currently subsidised telco infrastructure obsolete well before its use-by date.
It’s a little hard to see how Starlink would be shut out given it runs its own rails and has already struck major backhaul (that’s terrestrial cable trunk lines) deals with telco Vocus.
Then there’s the issue of speeds, with Starlink users cruising on between 50mbps to 100mbps which is around the same as metro retail NBN.
Kick it up to enterprise-grade (think schools, hospitals, businesses, essential services, etc) and those speeds sit on around 350mbps, though a better dish is required. That makes it highly appealing to state government departments and councils that have been piggybacking state-wide digital radio spectrum deals.
Windeyer said the federal department is looking at where LEOS are headed and reckons there’s still a bit of a way to go.
“I think there’s quite a lot of there’s quite a lot of work to be done in the in the market before those are actually live,” Windeyer said of mobile LEOS voice services to an everyday handset.
“But it’s absolutely an area of promise, both for data and for voice. I guess the other early example is you’re beginning to see the use of these satellite services in the public safety space.”
With climate change events like floods and fires routinely wiping out tracts of infrastructure now almost every year, and the federal and state governments being pressed to offer lasting resilient communication solutions, the NBN, its minister Michelle Rowland and her department could soon start to feel some real grassroots pressure for change.
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