Consumers living with NBN Sky Muster satellite services will be transitioned to Amazon’s Kuiper Low Earth Orbit Satellites, potentially as soon as next year.
It wasn’t a secret that NBN’s transition plan away from its ageing Sky Muster Satellite services was going to Amazon and its Project Kuiper Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite system (hat tip to the AFR for breaking that one).
Today, NBN Co made that announcement rather more formal, while still leaving a whole host of mostly-as-yet-unanswered questions.
If you’re an existing NBN Sky Muster Satellite customer, the good news is that the future does indeed look fast – or at least faster than what you can currently get. Here’s the current state of play.
Why is NBN Co abandoning Sky Muster?
What goes up… must come down (Image: Amazon)
NBN’s geostationary Sky Muster Satellites were launched in 2015/2016 as a method of providing broadband access to the most remote parts of Australia. The plan here was always to cover off the areas where it really wasn’t financially (or in some cases geographically) feasible to provide fixed wireless or fixed line services.
The issue with satellites is that, like everything else in this universe, they’re subject to the laws of physics, and in order to have them at a distance where they could provide useful service, they’re still subject to Earth’s gravity.
The planet Earth is rather larger than a pair of satellites, and this means over time their orbit was always going to decay.
The mathematics are rather complex, and while I do have physicist friends who could probably calculate this with some frighteningly complex charts, what you need to know here is that the estimated end of useful life date for Sky Muster was long known to be around 2032.
There always had to be a replacement.
So what’s different about Amazon’s Project Kuiper?
Where Sky Muster uses a pair of satellites in fixed orbit to deliver broadband services to Australia, Project Kuiper uses a constellation of satellites at a much lower orbital distance – hence their being Low Earth Orbit (LEO) systems.
Again, the physics gets complicated, but let’s just go with the explanation that “closer” equals “potentially faster” and go with that to keep it quite simple. If only I had an infographic… oh, look, here’s one:
(Image: Amazon)
So far, Amazon’s got 78 satellites in orbit, but the eventual plan is to have some 3,236 satellites located around the world to deliver service globally.
When will NBN Co shift from Sky Muster to Project Kuiper?
While I’m sure deals have been struck and there are probably some dates inked in behind closed doors, NBN Co and Amazon are being slightly coy about exactly when it’ll shift its first customers from Sky Muster to Project Kuiper, beyond a statement that it hopes to offer services in Australia from mid 2026 through participating retail service providers.
Once again, I’ll point out (because people do get this wrong, and it’s not surprising) that NBN Co is the company building and running the NBN; you never buy Internet services directly from NBN Co, so even when the Project Kuiper shift does happen, existing Sky Muster based customers will still be dealing with an intermediary ISP.
Hang on, LEO satellites… this sounds a lot like Starlink!
It sure does, and not without reason. Elon Musk’s Starlink services are already available in Australia, and they use a similar system of LEO satellites for service provision, albeit in a purely private business manner.
That does matter, because NBN Co has an obligation (as a government owned body) to provide services, where Starlink can (and sometimes does) operate at the whims of its owner.
If I annoy Elon Musk too much (and wow, it’s so very tempting) and I was a Starlink customer, he could conceivably cut my service.
Lots of people annoy the Australian government, but that’s less likely with the NBN, because it’s their whole business case, and they’ve got that obligation of service to keep in mind.
That’s a little different from saying they always meet that obligation – horror stories abound – but it’s at least present.
How much will Project Kuiper services cost over the NBN?
Good question! The problem here is… we don’t know, and it doesn’t appear that NBN Co quite knows just yet either. In a statement, NBN Co said that
“NBN Co will shortly start consultation with RSPs, regional communities and stakeholders, to help inform what speed tiers are offered, wholesale pricing and the upgrade for customers.”
So… we don’t know right now, though I’d hope we wouldn’t see large scale price increases.
Right now, Sky Muster plans run from around $60-$100/month, depending on speeds and data provisioning, and it will be quite interesting to see how those newer plans compare given the potential for some considerably better speeds under a LEO system, as well as the existing Starling competition.
I’m on Sky Muster. Will I have to upgrade my existing equipment?
Image: Amazon
Yes, you will. LEO satellite systems do use different technology – and frankly for some Sky Muster users, considerably newer equipment – to their higher satellite neighbours for reception, so you’ll have to switch to new gear. Amazon has a variety of receiver types tied to the expected speeds for each connection, and it will be interesting to see which hardware sets NBN Co runs with. The 100Mbps 7 inch set should be cheaper to deploy, but obviously has a speed cap, while at the top of the tree the 19 inch version can run up to 1Gbps — but that would be pricier to buy, no doubt, plus pricier to ship to the remote parts of Australia that this service is designed to operate in.
That upgrade cost shouldn’t – at least in theory – include much if any internal home networking gear however, and it feels fairly likely that, as with external NBN connections and devices, that NBN Co will foot the bill for the replacement equipment, though to what level they might subsidise new internal equipment is up in the air.
That’s in contrast to the competing Starlink system, which charges an equipment price as part of its pricing model.
If LEO satellites cover all of Australia, will all of the NBN shift to Project Kuiper?
It’s highly unlikely that this will happen; while you can get better performance out of an LEO system than you can from Sky Muster, that pales against the speeds that pure optical fibre on the ground can manage, and the endpoints for this system will ultimately be on-ground fibre connections anyway.
Well before the first Sky Muster customer shifts to Kuiper we’ll see a bump up in NBN speed tiers in September this year for FTTP and HFC customers, and NBN continues to work to try to transition as many FTTN customers to FTTP as possible.
NBN’s own statements on this make this rather more apparent too, noting that
“NBN Co plans to offer wholesale residential-grade fixed LEO satellite broadband services to more than 300,000 premises within our existing satellite footprint via participating Retail Service Providers (RSPs).”
That still leaves millions of Australians on fixed line services. As has been the case since its inception, your choice of NBN services is determined by your location – you don’t get to pick which technology you’re using.
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[kofi]
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