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Australia's Great Linux-Based Satellite Network

Posted by timothy on from the that's-not-a-network-that's-a-network dept.

yBshy4 writes "This article may interest the Slashdot folk. LinuxWorld Australia is reporting on Australia's largest satellite network, covering some 800,000 square kilometres, or most of the state of New South Wales, has gone live. The network consists of 75 Linux-based satellite routers that provide Wi-Fi (802.11b) connectivity to country towns that are unable to get DSL. The routers are engineered by Ursys and run Debian providing gateway services such as DNS and mail. According to the article, Ursys chose Debian 'because of its packaging support, which facilitates the ability to push updates to the routers remotely.' Ursys tried to use Windows but it was 'too unstable.' Hopefully this is an important step to providing better Internet access to regional areas across Australia. Anyone know of similar Internet access projects around the world?"

3 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Broadband in Australia by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 5, Informative

    For sure, outback australia has some real problems getting internet access. Everyone has moaned to Telstra for ages about this, so it's good to see soemthing get done about it.

    Australia likes the idea of wireless.... or at least we don't want to have to look at masses of wires all over our skyline.

    There was a broadband cable rollout some years back, and a lot of residents complained that the extra overhead cable would wreck their view and lower their houses values due to the nasty look of an extra cable floating above them. Several local councils petitioned to have the cables dug underground, but after a feasibility test was done, putting the cables underground was found to be too expensive.... so the phone company did nothing in those areas. Now the local governments that protested the cable roll-out are all stuck using dial-up modems.

    --
    READY.
    PRINT ""+-0
  2. From someone who actually supports these things... by arduous · · Score: 5, Informative

    As an IT consultant (and formerly an ISP guy) I am doing the end-customer support and installations for one of these POP's on the VIC/NSW border.

    The Ursys guys run their own internal APT repository that all the BusiBox's update from (Yes, the BusiBox's are just normal rackmount PC's), allowing then to easy automate updates.

    Their "web interface" is just a custom version of webmin.

    I have no idea what the $3500/month for 1GB is about. I dont deal with the billing side at all.

    But the service appears to work well. I am looking forward to see how much range we can get out here with the 802.11b gear, as ADSL is unlikely to come to most of these towns for many years.

    --
    "It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix
  3. Re:My wallet just shriveled. by Jack+Porter · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yeah, that policy sure seems to be affecting the 50Mbps internet connection I have at my apartment here in Seoul, South Korea.

    I have no bandwidth limits and it costs me about $US30 a month. There is a transproxy in the middle for HTTP, but I can still BitTorrent at 500KB-1MB/second. And for HTTP stuff that hits the transproxy cache, I regularly get 4-5 MegaBYTES a second.

    I'm an Australian who's been living in the US and now Korea. The price of wholesale bandwidth in the Australia is insane and has barely decreased in the 5 years since I left...