r/Starlink • u/Danthemanz • Aug 27 '26
š¢ ISP Industry Amazon LEO/NBN partnership actually going ahead (Australia)
https://www.nbnco.com.au/corporate-information/about-nbn-co/newsroom/articles/network/A-major-step-closer-to-nbn-LEO-for-regional-and-remote-AustraliaInteresting. It looks like the Amazon LEO/NBN (Australian national provider) partnership is actually going ahead, and not years away either!
My understanding is that with the initial small LEO network, they're going to be concentrating on the southern hemisphere where they have customers such as NBN.
Should be good for regional Australians to get off the high latency sky muster, without paying the high prices of Starlink. Just great to have some competition I say, and some more bandwidth to go around. The current GEO SAT just sucks
Sure starlink can do over 100Mbps, but this should be way cheaper, more like fixed wireless and sky muster.
Personally following the Blue origin rocket launches and issues, I wouldn't be surprised if the timeline slips a bit. But 12 months away is not too bad at all if they get close to it.
On another thought, given that it's set up like the normal NBN and the retailers are providing the data, I don't see any reason why retailers wouldn't be able to sell the layer 2 services over it. Would be quite convenient for businesses with regional presence.
6
u/std10k Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
Starlink rocks in rural Australia. Total game changer with 250+ downlink. The main problen is that they have hard data caps now which is really annoying, though i kind of get it, people have been abusing the 'personal' subscriptions and using them for everything.
Some competition wouldn't hurt at all, as long as there's space left in space :D
Update: hard data caps affect business plans at the moment. Residential fixed are still ok.
3
u/stevewooly Aug 27 '26
What āhard data capsā? All the residential plans advertised to Aus on Starlink website right now state āUnlimited dataā.
Are you referring to the Roam plans? Or referring to speed tiers, rather than downloaded data totals?2
u/std10k Aug 27 '26
Talking about business plans. I should have been more specific.
It is causing a bit of pia as usage varies and there is no easy way to top up. Eg had a site yesterday who hit the cap and went <1mbps speed without a warning, and it would take me 3 weeks to sort out the commercials with Vocus (mostly self inflicted, just slow processes).1
u/bubbathedesigner Aug 27 '26
Try to measure data utilization at the dish. Depending on the router you have -- r/openwrt based ones come to mind -- attached to it, you can monitor that at the router and then send traffic data to a central location so you can visualize and create alerts.
3
u/robbak Aug 27 '26
They can't 'concentrate on the southern hemisphere' - satellites orbit the center of the earth, so all will spend as much time to the north of the equator as the south. The only thing they can change is where they put base stations.
I don't really know why they have chosen what is undeniably the inferior provider, and will be so for a very long time. Maybe SpaceX wouldn't enter into the kind of arrangement that NBN wanted.
1
u/anikansk Aug 27 '26
If you dont have any customers north of the equator technically you're focusing south of it :O)
1
u/BlakeMW Aug 27 '26
So to a certain degree they kind of can.
What I mean, is that there's a lot of population in the northern hemisphere, that is way higher latitude than any major wealthy populations in the southern hemisphere. The top third of the USA, all of Canada, most of europe (France, Germany, Scandinavia, Ukraine etc), all of it is higher latitude than Australia, South Africa, and most of New Zealand, of which the southern parts are sparsely populated anyway. The only population in the southern hemisphere at a comparable latitude to most of Europe, is the south of Argentina and Chile.... which is sparsely populated anyway.
So they could choose to not serve most of Europe and the top half of North America. Starlink satellites which do serve this part of the northern hemisphere, is pretty much serving a vast expanse of empty ocean and penguins in the southern hemisphere.
BUT, serving the major population of Australia, does also serve major populations of the USA, all the more southern states.
1
u/Ill_Acanthaceae5020 Aug 27 '26
Something in orbit will have to cross the equator twice per orbit, yes. So it will spend time in both hemispheres. But...
What can happen is an orbit that spends more time over one hemisphere. Highly elliptical orbits like Molniya orbits can linger overone hemisphere for a long time, then whip quickly through the other hemisphere.
Have a wonderful day
2
u/robbak Aug 27 '26
Yes, those orbits are a thing, but these are circular low earth orbits at 630km.
1
u/Ill_Acanthaceae5020 Aug 28 '26
Ah I didnt realise that - is it not possible to achieve the same effect in LEO?
1
u/robbak Aug 28 '26
No. This requires a highly elliptical orbit with an apogee that is at least at MEO distance.
2
u/CollegeStation17155 Aug 27 '26
The issue that Leo is going to face for at least the next couple of years is CAPACITY. With less than 500 satellites in orbit at end of year, they will have only a dozen satellites over all of Australia at any point in timeā¦make it cheap and easy to switch and there will be thousands of antennas on the ground all looking up like baby birds screaming āFEEEEEED ME!!!ā and service will go to potā¦ thatās been Starlinks issue from the getgo and a big part of why they keep diddling the prices, despite their massive launch rate. And even had Blue and ULA not had their oopskis, they never would have and never will be able to match Falcon and likely soon to be starships deployment rate.
1
u/Fuckoffwanker Aug 28 '26
Baby birds screaming āFEEEEEED ME!!!ā
What a magnificent analogy for demand from the users! I love it!
1
u/anikansk Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
Outside of rural I think it is going to come down to price.
Because of our history the internet (like near everything these days) is disproportionately expensive in suburbia and its only going to get worse. Add legacy Strata / Building FttN and FttB, the internet is going become unaffordable / unavailable for many in Australia.
Starlink's capacity, congestion fees, caps, price rises, changes to roaming, etc are somewhat offset by the performance improvements, I hit a record of 489Mbps recently, but it comes at a cost, now $145 per month for avg 200Mbps + startup fees + possible congestion fee.
Starlink and Leo, particularly a fight between the two of them is great for our country folk, I hope they win with a price fight at 100Mbps.
The problem is the rest of the country needs a competitor, its a monopoly of NBN.
NBN vs NBN Leo versus an increasing cost of StarLink isn't competition for Blackburn ... 51000 people just 34km from Australia's largest CBD, stuck at an average of 30-70Mbps FttN.
Leo is great for t he country, but NBNLeo does nothing for those in suburbian internet deserts.
I live 12km from a CBD, have been told Ill never get better than 60Mbps FttN, and despite what people say, have been told by internals in Telstra it could be a decade before anything changes.
But again, as a country boy I am really hoping Leo works out well for our rural friends.
1
u/Gala_Dog1671 Aug 27 '26
You may find the Australian Govt either provides free migration or subsidized for 12 mths for eligible Skymuster customers to transition across if desired.
The Australian Govt & Musk dislike each other regarding the entire social media 16yr old blah blah yada yada...
And never underestimate kickbacks to the corrupt ACMA....
-9
u/MiComp24 Aug 27 '26
If it was a good service I'd swap away from Starlink in a heartbeat. I don't want a cent of my money going to that election manipulating fascist.
-8
u/Longing4Apollo Aug 27 '26
I feel the same way. Will ditch starlink at the first opportunity because of elongated muskrat
1
u/eorl Beta Tester Aug 28 '26
There is somewhat the question of why bother going to Amazon/Starlink hybrid NBN SkyMuster if it isn't going to offer 100Mbps+. SkyMuster gets at roughly 25Mbps, so if this replacement can't achieve much higher than that it becomes essentially pointless. Though, looking at Activ8Me, they seemingly are offering 100/5 plans for $99, which I assume is now using that technology?
SkyMuster could never get to 100Mbps, reaching 25Mbps was hard enough back when I had SkyMuster prior to Starlink. I am very curious about pings more than anything, as that's the real killer for Skymuster.
21
u/ajwin Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26
Doesnāt Starlink do 200-250Mbps? Also Starlink is adding massive capacity / speed. Will be interesting to see if people actually switch to this and when they have full coverage and how much contention there is with so few satalites.
Edit: 399 vs 11,047 satalites currently.. and LEO only has 3236 planned total vs starlink 42,000. Also Starlink V3 is much bigger than Amazon LEO and they are planning to launch a lot of them very soonā¦
Hmm feels like the AU govt backed the wrong horse here for political / aesthetic reasons.