NBN satellite plans on target for 2015

James Riley
Wednesday, 19 October 2011 11:35

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

The NBN Company expects to make its purchasing decision for two satellites for the national broadband network within the next "couple of months" before turning its attention to finding a supplier for its earth-based satellite services.

Despite some slippage in the timetable for the fibre network roll-out, NBN Co chief executive Mike Quigley has told a senate committee the company expected its satellite services to be delivered to the bush on time in 2015.

The company was in discussion with international authorities to secure two slots in geostationary orbit for the NBN satellites, as well as spectrum for their use and did not anticipate any problems with these issues.

The 80Gbps Ka-band satellites are expected to each cost between $250 million and $300 million.

"In relation to the satellite, these are big, complex machines, (and) we are going about this very carefully," Mr Quigley said. "We have done a lot of research and have brought on a fair bit of expertise."

"Over the next couple of months we expect to proceed with the decision on the space segment, before moving on to the earth segment," he said. "We expect to continue and meet the timeframes which we had originally predicted which was by 2015 to have services available."

Responding to questions from Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz, Mr Quigley said it was not practical or wise to launch a single satellite to provide services to the 3 per cent of rural and remote Australians who will not be connected to the NBN by either fibre or fixed wireless services.

"The issue that you always have to deal with when your dealing with satellites now is that you potentially have a large number of people who have no other means of broadband communications. (To use) a single satellite would not be a wise move. It's a risk argument, but also a capacity argument," Mr Quigley said.

"To have insufficient capacity on a single satellite I think would be doing the bush a disservice," he said.

Mr Quigley said it was not practical to try to provide on-going satellite services to the bush by sharing space on existing platforms, given the bandwidth of services NBN Co is obligated to provide.

"The only satellites similar to the ones that we are going to be launching are being launched over North America. These are big, 80 Gbps per second Ka-band satellites with multiple spot beams. Its simply not a practical engineering proposition to share capacity on a satellite ... even if one were available," Mr Quigley said.

Communications minister Stephen Conroy said the NBN Co was already providing interim satellite services that were faster and cheaper than had previously been available to people in the bush from private providers. The new satellite would improve that further.

"The service we are providing now is both faster and cheaper. Let us be clear. The satellite service that NBN Co is now providing is both faster and cheaper that what people had been receiving (previsously)," Senator Conroy said.

"To your question of do we believe that imposing this wholesale monopoly is to the benefit of the nation ... it's not just to the benefit of the nation, it's to the benefit of consumers - particularly consumers that have had a very poor experience with satellite," he said.