NewSat pans Optus, Ipstar in bid to for Government satellite funding

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 11 December 2007 08:14

IT Industry - Strategy

NewSat contends that current policy discussions largely ignore remote Australians. "They do not fall in the 98 percent of the population addressed by the Rudd Government's FTTN plan, nor are they addressed by the Opel project...Neither proposal covers the bulk of the land mass of Australia where communications are required and neither proposal addresses this land mass and communication needs of Australians when they are in that 90 percent of Australia."

NewSat claims that two recent major developments have increased the advantages and the attractiveness of and therefore the demand for geostationary satellites – the introduction of spot beam services in the Ka band and the development of VoIP services. "The use of spot beams over Ka band could enable NewSat to manage more effective spectrum re-use, and thereby deliver higher bandwidth services to each user. This means that the satellite customer can achieve just as effective a broadband service as a terrestrial user.... NewSat spot beam technology over Ka band would not only enhance performance of satellite-delivered broadband communications for remote Australia, but given a range of commercial assumptions, it can slash costs of those services by approximately 50 percent as well."

However any voice service, VoIP or otherwise, delivered over a geostationary satellite is subject to a delay of at least a quarter of a second for each satellite 'hop', this being the time taken for the signal to travel to the satellite in orbit at a height of 36,000kms, and back again. Where both parties'  are routed via satellite, not unlikely for remote Australians, the delay is doubled. To this would be added any latency introduced by the terrestrial component of the packet data service.

NewSat's argument that this issue is not significant is less than convincing. It presents details of control of farm machinery, not real time voice. "Extensive tests with the Victorian State Government's Spatial Information Unit for high precision automated farming have shown that recent (2006-07) developments in satellite technology by this research group are world-beating and the delays are so minimal that farm machinery operational tolerances have been reduced from a world-wide standard of two or three metres to just ten millimetres as a result of improvements in satellite performance, latency and management of information."

Separately NewSat, in alliance with terrestrial ISP, DoDo, has a proposal before DCITA for subsidy to deliver ViaSat's Surfbeam hub technology in Ku band to remote Australians .