There are currently 400 satellites orbiting us. So why do our towns have such terrible internet?

Wednesday September 6, 2023

Elon Musk owns and operates nearly 3,000 satellites – more than a third of those currently operating in our skies. So why can he provide good internet when our government can’t, asks Greg Hallam

Wednesday September 6, 2023

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One thing you can guarantee will cause a fight in a country pub is defending the NBN’s Sky Muster or Telstra’s alternative internet service. They said it was bad.

Of course, LEO are low earth orbit satellites and could very well be the real answer for large swaths of Queensland and indeed Australia, where there is first class internet service.

Residents in the bush complain about their current poor Internet service. Only recently did Belinda Murphy, the long-serving former Mayor of McKinlay Shire, based at Julia Creek in outback Queensland, say this: “Telstra should be ashamed of the way they treat rural and regional areas. Australian village.

“Our internet service is interrupted approximately 10 times a day at our local business, making this not only frustrating for customers and staff but also very costly.”

That sentiment is echoed throughout the bush. Data caps, download speeds and high prices put rural and remote Queenslanders at a major disadvantage.

That was a live issue in the last federal election, because the previous Coalition Government claimed the Sky Muster was a silver bullet, which it wasn’t. It piled up in the bush and remains that way to this day.

It’s true that more fiber is being installed and Point of Presence facilities are being built, but it’s just a blip in the Outback and the roll-out is slow. Large areas of land will never have fiber in the ground, and that’s what Sky Muster is all about – covering the rest.

The difference in the platforms provided by large, GEO, satellites (think Sky Muster) is that they are much larger and operate farther out in space than LEO. It is fair to say that LEO is everywhere today, even in space.

They currently account for 84% of all satellites in orbit. For example, LEO operates at an altitude of 500-1000 km above Earth, while GEO (e.g. Sky Muster) operates at an altitude of 36,000 km above our planet.

In terms of size, GEO is about 26m long, 12m wide, 9m high and weighs about 6500kg.

LEO is the size of a dining table and weighs about 250kg. It’s understandable that putting LEO into space would be a lot cheaper than GEO.

In May this year, the Satellite Tracking website, Orbiting Now, estimated there were 7,700 satellites in space.

To emphasize how many LEOs are flying around us, Elon Musk’s Star Link alone has 2750 of its satellites in the sky, with approval for his company Space X to launch another 12,000.

They claim that at any given time there are more than 400 LEO Star Links in orbit just above Australia.

It is the sheer number of LEOs and their proximity to the earth that gives them far superior coverage and service characteristics.

To put it somewhat humorously, various national government space agencies around the globe recently agreed and installed “satellite traffic management systems,” that is the number of devices.

Jetsons, here we come.

To date, Star Link’s entry and operating costs have been very competitive, making it attractive to many. But a word of warning, it’s a virtual monopoly.

That a private operator, Musk, and not our government or its former giants Telstra and NBN, is meeting the needs of the bush market is more than questionable. Interestingly, the Ukrainian Government and Army are using Star Link in their war effort.

It is proving to be very important. At one point a few months ago, Musk publicly expressed his view that he might withdraw access, after which the US government reached an agreement with him.

The Pentagon continues to say that it is concerned that one individual has such influence in global security arrangements. There’s a bit of James Bond villains in this development.

Bush may have just found their connectivity savior in LEO. The internet connection is really good and the chances are actually operating at the same level of play as their scrappy city cousins.

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