SYDNEY: People in parts of remote and rural Australia will have to wait another year before enjoying faster internet speeds through the National Broadband Network (NBN).
Construction work on all 10 of the NBN Co’s satellite ground stations have been completed and are now being tested, which will take months to do.
NBN Co’s space systems managing architect Julia Dickenson said many people in country areas still relied on dial-up internet services which were “dramatically slower” than high speed broadband services.
“Something we all take for granted in the cities is the ability to connect to the internet quickly so we’re going to close the digital divide by providing this new satellite service to the regional areas of Australia,” she said.
“At the moment things are pretty slow [in many regional areas] and you can download a YouTube video taking an hour and a half to do that.
“This will reduce it down to about 11 seconds.”
Ms Dickenson said downloading a movie could take more than three days. That will be reduced to about 10 minutes once the satellites are launched.
She said the first satellite would be launched later this year, but the new services would not be available until early 2016.
“The satellites are in their final phases of testing at the moment in California and they’ll become the main components of the solution which will be ready for the public early next year,” Ms Dickenson said.
Once the launch vehicle is ready, 400,000 people and businesses in regional and remote areas will have access to the new services, NBN Co said.
“This [will] cover the whole of Australia including all our island territories,” Ms Dickenson said.
“We can get to everywhere with the satellites – remote cattle stations, areas just outside cities and remote Aboriginal lands.
“They’re going to get about a hundred times better-than-dial-up speeds with our new service.”
The satellite stations are located in Ceduna, Broken Hill, Bourke, Wolumla, Carnarvon, Geraldton, Kalgoorlie, Waroona, Roma and Geeveston.
Australia ranks 44th for average connection speed, according to The State of the Internet Report from cloud service provider Akamai.
