Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

First of 2 Australian NBN Satellites Launched Successfully

Posted by timothy on from the watching-your-traffic-from-above dept.

New submitter aduxorth writes: Sky Muster, the first of the two satellites that will comprise Australia's NBN's Long-Term Satellite Service, has been successfully launched from Guiana Space Centre in South America. The two geostationary satellites will offer a total capacity of 135 gigabits per second, with 25/5Mbps wholesale speeds available to end users. The second satellite is expected to launch next year. Testing of this satellite will start soon and will continue until services are launched early next year.

58 comments

  1. Say "Hello World/Howdy" by vikingpower · · Score: 1

    to kangaroo farmers in the dust clouds of Kookaburra County, Nullarbor plains.

    --
    Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
  2. 700 ms latency, though... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    700 ms latency, though. You'll want to have pre-caching turned on in your browser, and don't ever expect to play games outside of simple, single-player Flash based games.

    1. Re:700 ms latency, though... by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      You're right, this is a complete waste of time. I don't know why they bothered.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      --
      No sig today...
    2. Re:700 ms latency, though... by Tailhook · · Score: 2

      The latency is bad, but not that bad. Earth to geostationary and back round trip is about 250ms. Switching hardware and ground relay adds a few tens of milliseconds more, so typically you're well above 250ms but not usually more than 300ms. 700ms is some other problem; congestion or something.

      But yes, the long round trip makes these systems unsuitable for low latency applications; certainly real time gaming is impossible, but also even just voice communication becomes awkward with that much delay. Some popular online games can be played with high latency; I know of EVE players that play successfully over satellite. That game only updates clients about four times a second at best.... so another quarter second of lag isn't that big a deal.

      If your alternative is living in the dark then tens of megabits of high-latency bandwidth is pretty damn appealing.

      --
      Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
    3. Re:700 ms latency, though... by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      700 ms latency, though. You'll want to have pre-caching turned on in your browser, and don't ever expect to play games outside of simple, single-player Flash based games.

      Maybe they plan on using it for more important things than games?

      So, a google search for "Australia remotest town" comes up with Telfer, which sounds like it's so far past the arse end of nowhere as to be unimaginable to most of us.

      When everything is hours away (if not days), 700ms latency is probably quite a step up.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    4. Re:700 ms latency, though... by pacman+on+prozac · · Score: 1

      The 700ms is probably talking about the network RTT seen when you ping a host as the data is travelling up to the geostationary satellite and back twice, once as it goes from you to the end host and then once again on the return trip.

      However most network traffic doesn't behave like that, TCP doesn't acknowledge every packet in a connection, so not everything would suffer that kind of delay.

    5. Re:700 ms latency, though... by DrXym · · Score: 1
      And the latency is because the the satellites are in a geostationary orbit a horribly way long way away - signals having to go out 35000km out to the satellite and back again to some base station.

      The other alternative is lots of satellites in a low earth orbit, with one coming into a range as another one leaves and some kind of data relay mechanism for sending data to a base station. A more complex solution but latencies would be much lower and it would probably scale better. The same satellites could even be used to service parts of Africa and South America.

    6. Re:700 ms latency, though... by petermgreen · · Score: 1

      The latency is bad, but not that bad. Earth to geostationary and back round trip is about 250ms. Switching hardware and ground relay adds a few tens of milliseconds more, so typically you're well above 250ms

      Network latencies are usually quoted as "round trip time" (that is the time from sending a packet to the server to getting a reply back). The round trip between you and the server passes through the sattelite twice so that brings you up to 500ms.

      And that is for a link where you have a timeslot availible already. If you have to request a timeslot from the sattelite before transmitting then you just added another 250ms.

      If your alternative is living in the dark then tens of megabits of high-latency bandwidth is pretty damn appealing.

      I agree

      --
      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    7. Re:700 ms latency, though... by dbIII · · Score: 1

      The other alternative is lots of satellites in a low earth orbit, with one coming into a range as another one leaves and some kind of data relay mechanism for sending data to a base station

      That's ideal, but the problem (as seen with Iridium doing that) is getting enough people around the planet to agree to pay for it. It's a management/diplomacy problem that gets in the way of an ideal technical solution.

  3. Cap? by sims+2 · · Score: 1

    What are the data usage limits on the new service or the cost for that matter?

    Quick check on google turned up this article on gizmodo australia; "Satellite NBN Customers Are Reportedly Getting Shafted On Their Data Caps" http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015...

    --
    Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
    1. Re:Cap? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      that shafting was supposedly due to lack of actual bandwidth availability, The new satellites are supposed to address that. regardless all NBN offerings are massively overpriced due to the massive cost of it. It was an absolute financial mess under the previous government and it isn't much better under this one.

  4. No mention of price points? by jandrese · · Score: 1

    The article seems to have failed to mention the price point for the service. That's a big sticking point with satellite broadband.

    --

    I read the internet for the articles.
    1. Re:No mention of price points? by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      Sure it is ... but I'm sure there's some sufficiently remote places in Australia who would never get it otherwise. I mean, aren't some of these ranches (or whatever they're called) literally thousands of square miles?

      Nobody is going to run a cable past your house when your 'driveway' takes hours to drive down, and your nearest neighbor is a few hours away.

      So, if your choice is "no internet at all", or "expensive satellite coverage ... which are you going to take?

      The rules are different when you're so far in the middle of nowhere there's no other option.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:No mention of price points? by jabuzz · · Score: 1

      So the solution to that is to launch at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a couple of satellites, which might last 15 years tops. I would have serious doubts that this is cheaper than running some fibre even in the short term let alone the long term.

    3. Re:No mention of price points? by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, either the people who did this are complete morons .. or they've worked out their business model and decided it is viable.

      I mean, who is going to string thousands of kilometers of fiber through the outback?

      Me, I'm thinking by the time you build and launch the satellites you've give it some thought, and that random comments on the internet aside, have probably concluded it is worth it ... by whatever metrics you use to make that decision.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    4. Re:No mention of price points? by thinkwaitfast · · Score: 1

      The internet is smarter than people who do things for a living.

    5. Re:No mention of price points? by cdrudge · · Score: 1

      Price depends on the reseller. Just google NBN satellite price and you'll get a variety of answers. Here's one for example.

    6. Re:No mention of price points? by jabuzz · · Score: 2

      What business model would that be? It is Australia's NBN which is a government funded scheme to provide a new national broadband network. Most of the 400,000 premises that the NBN satellite connect will be in remote small towns. Places like Coober Pedy not stations in the middle of nowhere.

      The NBN satellite program is around 1.5 billion USD, that is an awful lot of fibre optic cable, and in 15-20 years time when the satellite packs in will need to be spent again, while the steel armoured fibre will be doing just fine, carrying way more data at much higher speeds.

      In the long run the only game in town is fibre, *EVERYTHING* else is a stop gap. This is a very very expensive stop gap.

    7. Re:No mention of price points? by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      Well, in the mean time, people will be able to have satellite internet now ... as opposed to waiting 15-20 years in the hope that someone eventually strings cable to them.

      I have an aunt and uncle here in North America .. they're on an old fashioned party line and can't get cable ... because they're about 3km past the end of the cabling, and would have to spend HUGE amounts of money to get it ran as far as them. Like pay thousands of dollars for every few hundred feet since the companies don't see it as worth their time.

      I know people who can't get internet, but instead rely on a cellular router to be their internet. Again, if they want anything over a wire they have to pay thousands of dollars.

      Sometimes, the cost to string cable and all that entails, or the sheer number of years likely to wasted until it happens means that "stop gap" means you can actually see a solution, instead of hoping in 15-20 years you have a solution ... which in 15-20 years might still be 15-20 away.

      A lot of this stuff never actually seems to happen. So, then it's not a stop-gap, it's the only damned way it will get done.

      I'm betting in 15-20 years, a lot of people would still find they're no closer to having it.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    8. Re:No mention of price points? by JustNiz · · Score: 1

      >> I mean, who is going to string thousands of kilometers of fiber through the outback?

      Well there are plenty of big cities on both sides of Australia, and just outback in the middle. I don't know either way but I'd be *really* surprised if there is really no cables running through the outback connecting them (phone, data etc).

    9. Re:No mention of price points? by jandrese · · Score: 1

      Yep, it's pretty much as expected. AUS$25 for a 4GB data cap, going up to AUS$95 for 40GB, although you have to use more than half of that at night.

      It is nice to see that they offer some personal hosting space. And that they're still running it off of the 1998 machine they originally set up for it with the 1GB HDD so they can only give people 25MB of space. You don't see those much anymore.

      No IPv6 support is a bummer too. If you are launching a bird in 2015, the service should support IPv6.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    10. Re:No mention of price points? by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      I would have serious doubts that this is cheaper than running some fibre even in the short term let alone the long term.

      You do understand quite how the population of Australia is dispersed right?
      Well let me help you with it. Australia is only a bit smaller than the USA and has less than 1/10th of the population. The population we have is heavily centered around a handfull of major cities on the east, west, and south coast with two minor cities up north. Inland there is nothing. We don't have a Dallas, we don't have a St Louis, no Oklahoma city, or a Denver. What little population we have in the bush is highly decentralised to the point where we own the world biggest single lot of private land, and some people have even managed to claim a whole part of Australia as it's own country.

      What we do have is Texas style heat and even worse UV indexes so just throwing cables down across the desert will result in something that will last even less than 15 years. Speaking of effort we also have one of the most expensive labour forces in the world, and high cost of products, so take a rough estimate of what it would cost to run the fibre and then triple and you may start getting into the ballpark.

      Running fibre is about the single most expensive activity possible and the cost analysis was done (note I didn't say cost benefit, fibre in the rural areas failed purely on cost grounds without even considering the tiny amount of people out there), and to top it all off it wasn't even done by the current anti-internet government, it was done by the previous government and even they couldn't justify the cost of fibre out there.

      You don't decide to launch satellites just because.

    11. Re:No mention of price points? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      It's Australia. Think of the most ridiculous price you can imagine and then double it. You'll be pretty close.

    12. Re:No mention of price points? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just FYI the Austrlian term for what Americans call ranches is a station.

    13. Re:No mention of price points? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      OK using Coober Pedy as an example... you are going to lay cable to it. There is *no* infrastructure between Coober Pedy and anywhere else. Coober is not even connected to the national electrical grid(it burn diesel fuel to power the town... tho I think they built some wind turbines there). Cable has to be maintained and powered with repeaters. There is nobody and nothing to help do this in a cheap way.

    14. Re:No mention of price points? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Prepare to be surprised

      http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/546043/perth_sydney_connected_by_submarine_cable/

      People who are not from Australia seem to find it difficult to understand how empty the middle of Australia is. Running thru the Outback(in this case places like the Great Sandy Dessert) is like running cable thru Mars.

    15. Re:No mention of price points? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Microwave relay stations might be cheaper. If you do it the kiwi/aussie way (no.8 wire approach) you can install a 1Gbps 24Ghz wireless relay for $10k all inclusive ($5k installation cost, $5k of gear: solar panel, two bridges, mounting hardware). According to Wikipedia it's 846km from Adelaide, but for the sake of argument, that's probably the distance between post office town markers, so it's probably more realistic to say 800km to the nearest connected location. if you go 80km between spans, you need ten stations for a total cost of $100k + maintenance. Granted you're going to need huge parabolic antenna, but this isn't unfeasible. Budget on 1.5ms of added RTT per hop with wifi/super-wifi*, and that's 15ms of added latency, less than interleaving adds on ADSL.

      Now there's only 3000 people living in Coober Pedy, but this accounts for only $33.33 per person. The end service with a 10:1 oversubscription would be 2.3Mbps (going on my experience that 1Gbps super-wifi bridges are typically 700Mbps duplex in actual operation). Even if you were to double this cost, it would be quite a reasonable expenditure, much less than the cost of the CPEs and last mile, and there are good reasons you might want to like link level redundancy or multipath redundancy.

      I don't know if there isn't already microwave relay service to Coober Pedy, but there's no financial reason it isn't viable. Various things could be tuned like using higher power relay stations or more commercial grade solutions and it would still be feasible. People have successfully used 24GHz super-wifi gear with large 2.4m TVRO (solid) reflectors, and I can assure you that a 700Mbps link over an 80km span is feasible. If you don't mind adding additional latency, there are various proprietary routing protocols to do chain of custody routing to overcome intermediate node packet loss and increase usable bandwidth. Even at 10 times the cost, it's realistic, at $9.26/month over a 3 year subscription. If you're selling the enduser service at $50/month or $100/month it's easily a viable business model.

      Now compare that to fiber. Are you really going to install 850km of Fiber for $50k? $500k? I think not. At $50M, You might easily do it, at a cost of $16k/person or $138/month/person over 10 years, but that's barely financially feasible.

      If you expected the population to grow 10 fold, you could justify it, but where is the evidence that will happen.

      The question I have though is: Adelaide and Darwin are assuredly connected via highspeed fiber, does that go overland or around the coast? If it goes overland, it probably already runs through Coober Pedy and along the Stuart highway.

      Cable has to be maintained and powered with repeaters.

      Not true. The operation of submarine fiber optic cable relies on EDFA inline fiber amplifiers, and there is no requirement for electronic repeaters in the system. Furthermore research by a Swedish researcher that I'm too lazy to dig up, shows that you can achieve over 40Gbps passive over more than 1000km of SMF if you pay attention to chromatic dispersion, and insert index graded CD compensation fiber into the system. The Southern Cross submarine cable system operates over distances 5x that between coming ashore. That's not to say the investment in a fiber plant would be worth it in this instance, just that its feasible and doesn't require intermediate stations.

      I actually think this satellite system is kind of a bad idea, because at a cost of $1B, it's equivalent to building 100k microwave relays, which while not having quite the same penetration, would provide a much better quality service. With the aggregate bandwidth stated, and the same 10:1 oversubscription used in my analysis, they intend to have only 54k subscribers, at a cost of $18k per subscriber; a project so insanely expensive and uneconomical that only a government could afford it or consider it money well spent.

      -puddingpimp

      * By super-wifi I mean the collection of proprietary wireless systems that exist in the upper microwave band.

    16. Re:No mention of price points? by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

      while I don't agree with much that is being done with the NBN (under this or the previous government). It would be a FUCK load cheaper for the satellite solution than running fibre. I don't think you have any concept of just how sparsely populated most of Australia is, especially in the outback it can be a 100+ km to your neighbour, you have tiny communities of just a handful of people. running fibre to all these places would cost exponentially more than these very overpriced satellites.

    17. Re:No mention of price points? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      well shock horror, you are in for a surprise then. people don't seem to realise how sparsely populated Australia is. Their aren't cables running through the middle, We generally have ocean based cables (which surprise surprise don't connect towns a few thousand kilometres inland.) The connections that do run to those inland locations are basic at best and you could not even get even decent dialup over many of them. satellite phones are common. 90% of the Australian population live in or around the major capital cities, as soon as you leave that area population density plummets. Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world.

    18. Re:No mention of price points? by Xiaran · · Score: 1

      Back in the day I used to work on systems that had to maintain modem links to rural locations in VIC and NSW from Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. Compared to the actual Outback those places are in downtown New York for Australia and they were still insanely unreliable(Telstra had a commitment to maintain at least a 300baud rate on lines(!!) and it often wasn't and we had to complain). People from outside of Australia just don't understand.

    19. Re:No mention of price points? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      If you were aware of our government you'd be understanding why people are so annoyed. Sure this sat is a decent plan, but in all this government killed our NBN and declared the internet was only for time wasting funneling the billions of dollars it would have spent to have FTTP into our two biggest telcos to buy thier degraded copper (sight unseen, literally the contracted stated the copper couldn't be inspected prior to sale). The Liberals (who are right wing conservatives!) always mess up our economy and country, but the other major party isn't much better. 5 leaders in 5 years should be a sign we need a revolution.

    20. Re: No mention of price points? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Adelaide and Darwin are connected by undersea cable via Perth. There is also another route that runs up the east coast.
      Since this is a government project, the goal is to deliver internet to everyone, not just to the majority. Realistically the only way to do this in a place where some farms are bigger than some countries is via satellite. So the aim is not to deliver great internet to 99%, it is to deliver useable internet to every single premises.

    21. Re:No mention of price points? by dbIII · · Score: 1

      So, if your choice is "no internet at all", or "expensive satellite coverage ... which are you going to take?

      There is already expensive satellite coverage - the plan with these two satellites is cheap and much higher capacity than linking to a satellite over Dubai that charges a lot more per kb and could never handle the volume of customers that is planned.
      Some people may notice that the angle to a satellite over Dubai is getting close to the horizon (~20 degrees?) for the east coast of Australia, but most of Australia is very flat. This new one will be pretty close to overhead (in comparison, it's still over the equator), but the more important thing is the volume of traffic it can commit to Australian customers.

    22. Re:No mention of price points? by dbIII · · Score: 1

      I would have serious doubts that this is cheaper than running some fibre

      The distances are staggering and the population density is low. It would be like running fibre to tiny settlements on the north coast of Alaska for an almost direct comparison.

    23. Re:No mention of price points? by dbIII · · Score: 1
      The satellite IS for all those people in the middle of nowhere.

      The NBN satellite program is around 1.5 billion USD, that is an awful lot of fibre optic cable

      Not when you are measuring it in tens of thousands of kilometres once you work out the paths.

    24. Re:No mention of price points? by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Because it has not been announced yet. There has only been a mention that there will be a range of prices to discourage a few users hogging all of the bandwidth.

    25. Re:No mention of price points? by dbIII · · Score: 1

      They already have such a connection and it's nowhere near good enough for current traffic.

    26. Re:No mention of price points? by dbIII · · Score: 1

      That's connecting to the old stuff. The details for the new service are not out yet so when the service starts next year we'll be able to see if it has IPv6 or not - but I'd be astonished if it didn't.

    27. Re:No mention of price points? by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      The other reality of course creating and maintaining road roads is hugely more expensive than laying cable, many orders of magnitude greater. So if they are serviced by a public road at a huge loss to the state (considering traffic volumes) than why is a cable strung between poles such a nation bankrupting exercise or is the assessment being based purely upon greed and the desire for unlimited profits. Keep in mind the fibre optic cable is cheaper than laying the equivalent existing copper service over that same distance. You know what I say to this, giddyap pony express we can't afford that darned telegraph, with so few users and such huge distances, uh huh.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
    28. Re:No mention of price points? by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

      1.5 billion USD would not even make a dent in the cost of the amount of fibre you would need to cover people in outback Australia. even replacing the satellites every 10 years would likely be a huge saving by comparison.

    29. Re:No mention of price points? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not just about money either. But time; hooking up every remote community via fiber, even if it was free, will take decades due to the sheer scale of the project.

    30. Re:No mention of price points? by bloodhawk · · Score: 1

      it won't be 10's of thousands, it will be in the hundreds of thousands or more likely a million+ kilometres of cable needed if you actually expect to hook up houses. remember the northern territory alone is around 1.5 million square kilometres and that is not even half of the area you need to cover. There are people in NT where there driveway alone can be 100km, you could be averaging close to a million dollars a house to hook them up to fibre in a lot of areas.

    31. Re:No mention of price points? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "What business model would that be? It is Australia's NBN which is a government funded scheme to provide a new national broadband network."

      The business model of NBN Co. The NBN is a private wholesale network, with the government being the primary investor.
      This is different from a publicly owned network.

    32. Re: No mention of price points? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Coober pedy is not the issue, and may well end up with fibre. It is the thousands of isolated property that are many kilometers away from anywhere. They can only be effectively served by satellite. There are many idiot decisions in the NBN, but that is not one of them.

      Incidentally, when the international telegraph was put through in the 1850s it ran from Darwin to Adelaide. So Coober Pedy might well have had access to international telegrams before Sydney!

    33. Re:No mention of price points? by jabuzz · · Score: 1

      Really they seemed to manage running a telegraph cable through the middle of Australia in two years ending in August 1872 at at time where there was not even a map of the interior of Australia. I conclude that running some fibre 150 years later is not unreasonable.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    34. Re:No mention of price points? by dbIII · · Score: 1

      Yes but I wanted to avoid someone asking for an exact figure or dismissing me out of hand so I lowballed the number to something that still justifies it.

    35. Re:No mention of price points? by dave420 · · Score: 1

      Yeah, but north/south not east/west...

    36. Re:No mention of price points? by owski · · Score: 1

      So if they are serviced by a public road at a huge loss to the state

      They're not serviced by a public road. You might have a public road (really, a dirt track with the odd and rare sign) and then 20 house each 100 miles away from that road in different directions. So you'd need to string a couple thousand miles of fiber along the "public road", and then another couple thousand miles just to get those 20 houses hooked up. Multiply that a thousand times more and there you go.

      Imagine wiring up a thousand small towns where each town is so spread out you need a thousand miles of fiber just to hook them up to the main line, which itself is tens of thousands of miles long. Then you can start to see the scale.

    37. Re:No mention of price points? by rtb61 · · Score: 1

      Just a blatant liar. Why bother , yeah sure then can transport their animals to market on a dirt track, yeah sure not problems. Do you have any idea at all of the difference between a gravel road and a bitmen paved road (the bitumen water proof coating to extend the life of the compacted road). Clearing, grading, placing gravel and compacting the material all cost more than the final bitumen coating (the problem with the bitumen coating, getting it to location from metropolitan areas), were as the gravel to produce the base can be sourced relatively locally from a suitable source. Laying that cable has nothing at all, not in the slightest on producing a road..

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  5. It traveled up with ARSAT-2... by slimshady76 · · Score: 2

    the second communications satellite built in Argentina!!!

    1. Re:It traveled up with ARSAT-2... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's right!: ARSAT-2

  6. Death Adders In Space by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1

    This is the beginning of the end.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
    1. Re:Death Adders In Space by LifesABeach · · Score: 1

      Naw, I've still working on me Fosters.

    2. Re:Death Adders In Space by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1

      I hope you've brought enough for the whole class.

      --
      You are welcome on my lawn.
  7. I Have Reservations the Sat's by LifesABeach · · Score: 1

    I didn't see one Foster's logo anywhere on the launch vehicle. There not Aussie's then. Probably the launch was from Malaysia.

    1. Re:I Have Reservations the Sat's by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      well you wouldn't, Fosters is for the foreigners, I don't think I've even seen a Fosters anywhere since the late 80's

  8. Sky Muster Satellite Launch .. by nickweller · · Score: 1

    Sky Muster Satellite Launch

    1. Re:Sky Muster Satellite Launch .. by bug1 · · Score: 1

      'Sky Muster', best name ever, only a child could think up such a creative and succinct name.