Australian Satellite Broadband Market Reaches into Suburbia

The Australian government’s multibillion-dollar broadband development program will need to provide Ka-band satellite connectivity not only in the nation’s vast rural regions, but also along the east coast in the suburbs of urban centers, according to the government enterprise assigned to deploy the network.
 
The Australian National Broadband Network has been budgeted at 43 billion Australian dollars over 8 years. Its goal is to provide 90% of all Australian homes, schools and businesses with fiber-optic connectivity at 100 Mb/s.
 
The remaining 10% of users will be covered by wireless terrestrial links, or by two Ka-band satellites. For these users, the goal is connectivity at 12 Mb/s in downlink and 1-2 Mb/s on the uplink.
 
The satellite network would serve more than 200,000 users and feature 10 gateway Earth stations throughout Australia, with two antennas at each station. The company has apparently settled on the DVB-RCS transmission standard for its network.
 
Unlike the U.S. broadband stimulus package, Australia’s includes satellite links as instrumental to the plan’s stated deployment goals. NBN Co., which expects to take on private investors in the future, currently plans two Ka-band satellites covering Australia.
 
In a 9 th July 2010 presentation to the CEDA 2010 ICT Review organized by Australian information and communications technologies services provider CSG, Quigley implied that NBN Co. is still some distance from selecting a prime contractor for the satellites, which he said could take four years to develop. He said the company has already discarded the idea of launching only one satellite, even though a single spacecraft would have more than enough capacity to serve the intended market.
 

Quigley, said he understood that the latest Ka-band satellites could provide “30, 40, 50 or even approaching 100” gigabits per second of throughput. He said he is assuming it will cost about 500 million Australian dollars to build, launch and insure each one.
 
All-Ka-band broadband satellites currently under construction in the United States and Europe are designed to produce between 70 gigabits and 120 gigabits per second of throughput.
 
NBN Co.’s current design features satellites in two different orbital slots over Australia. But Quigley said the company is now investigating how closely spaced the satellites need to be to enable users to switch their rooftop antennas from one to the other seamlessly if needed.
 

Australia and the Middle East have long been considered ideal markets for Ka-band because signal attenuation from rain is less of an issue in both regions, and both feature large expanses of flat, lightly populated territory with relatively high per-capita income.
 
Aided by Australian government subsidies for broadband roll-out in recent years, satellite fleet operator Thaicom of Thailand has made Australia one of the biggest markets for its iPStar broadband satellite, which operates in Ku-band.