Turnbull revises history on NBN satellite demand

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news Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has accused the Australian Labor Party of underestimating how much demand the National Broadband Network would see for its satellite service, without mentioning that he personally had stated in Opposition that sufficient capacity already existed, alleging there was no need to build more.

Over the weekend, The Weekend Australian alleged that poor performance on nbn’s interim satellite service was driving “remote families to data despair”, with the congestion on the platform stopping, among other things, children from connecting to School of the Air for their education, businesses from connecting to conduct transactions, and individuals from being able to read the news or bank online.

The platform the newspaper was referring to was the nbn’s Interim Satellite Service. Launched in May 2011, the service uses existing satellites operated by Optus and IPstar to provide connectivity to a number of Australian households in very remote areas who otherwise would have access to very little broadband at all.

However, as time has passed, the limited capacity of the network has become strained, and it has reached capacity. The current Abbott Government has taken steps to limit its use to ensure all can use it to access the Internet on an equitable basis, but problems still exist. The solution is two satellites which nbn itself will launch itself in 2016 — which will provide massively enhanced capacity and a permanent solution for remote Australians.

In a statement posted on his website yesterday, Minister Turnbull said the problems with the satellite service were the fault of the previous Labor Government.

“One of the mistakes that Labor made in Government is that it sold its interim satellite service as offering ADSL-equivalent services in the city,” the Member for Wentworth wrote.

“This may have been true of headline speeds that could be achieved, but capacity is different. Whereas you can always make an incremental investment in the core of your network for fixed line – or even fixed wireless – networks to increase capacity, once a satellite is launched, its capacity is fixed until you decide to launch another one.”

“But Labor badly misjudged how much capacity would be needed on the Interim Satellite Service, and crucially underestimated how much demand there would be for the Long Term Satellite Service. A review of the fixed wireless and satellite services found that they had underestimated demand by around 200,000 end-user services. This has meant we have had to do substantial work and invest billions of dollars extra to ensure that we are able to cater for the extra demand.”

“They also had no tools to enforce ‘fair-use’ policies meaning that Retail Service Providers (RSPs) and heavy users could use data allowances of up to 60GB a month and clog services at peak times, without having to pay for that.”

“The NBN’s Long Term Satellite Service will be able to identify both RSPs and individual end users and take action to ensure they are not unduly disrupting capacity across the network.”

History of Opposition
What Minister Turnbull’s statement did not mention is that as Shadow Minister, he personally stated that existing capacity in Australia’s satellite system was sufficient.

In February 2012, at the height of the debate over nbn’s future satellite needs, then-Shadow Communications Minister Turnbull published a statement on his website claiming that nbn did not need to build its own satellites to cope with future demand.

“There is enough capacity on private satellites already in orbit or scheduled for launch for the NBN to deliver broadband to the 200,000 or so premises in remote Australia without building its own,” Turnbull said in his statement at the time. That statement appears to have been removed from the Minister’s personal website since that time.

At the time, to ascertain the technical truth of the satellite situation, Delimiter spoke with nbn’s satellite project director Matt Dawson about the matter. Dawson is still in the same position at nbn.

Dawson pointed that just launching that interim solution had already soaked up “the lion’s share” of the commercially available satellite capacity in Australia. “Even that hasn’t got anywhere near the capacity we need in the long term,” he said at the time.

Part of the capacity issue relates to the position of satellites. Some satellites over Australia also served the Asia-Pacific region, diminishing available capacity, while others target metropolitan areas, where commercial operators will make greater profits due to a heavier concentration of targets. In comparison, nbn explicitly targets users in remote areas, where normal satellite operators would find it hard to operate a commercially successful service.

At the time, Dawson said that NBN Co could probably kluge together something like 6 to 10GHz of capacity through commercially available agreements. The total capacity available to Australia was something like 40GHz, he said. In comparison, nbn’s own satellites would be able to deliver something like 90GHz.

Turnbull was also contradicted at the time by Optus chief Paul O’Sullivan, who stated that the company’s satellite capacity — the largest in Australia — was already accounted for and could not meet nbn’s requirements.

opinion/analysis
I would respectfully make two very humble suggestions to Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Firstly, I would suggest that the Minister acknowledge that he was wrong in his statements in Opposition about existing satellite capacity in Australia being able to meet the needs of the NBN project.

Secondly, I would suggest that the Minister acknowledge that the previous Labor Government was seeking to address this issue by having nbn build its own satellites.

It’s true that nbn didn’t manage its Interim Satellite Service as well as it could have under the previous Labor administration, and that the company has put in some workarounds under the Coalition administration to help resolve this issue as a stopgap. However none of that changes the fact that it was Labor which kicked off both programs to start with. That was the right thing to do then — and it is still the right thing to do now.

Lastly, we’d appreciate it if the Minister could re-publish the original statement he made about the satellite situation back in 2012. The post was entitled “Satellite deal — more wasteful NBN spending”. We can’t find it, and we’d like it back.

Image credit: nbn

69 COMMENTS

    • Turnbull was right in the quote provided. Satellite capacity issues are directly caused by the previous govt; 1) providing uncapped data usage and 2) killing new capacity with the announcement of the NBN’s own satellite.

      I posted a similar comment on this site around the same time.

      The uncaping of data demonstrated Conroy’s (and presumably NBNCo, though Conroy’s abuse typically enough to silence any dissenting opinion) lack of understanding of this market.

      Additional Ku-band satellites has been launched since the announcement that could have provided additional capacity to Australia, however haven’t because of NBNCo decision to kill ROI (same in other data markets, ironically left targeting high value govt users).

      We wait to see how successful NBN’s (delayed) satellites launch and operate. Given the rest of the company’s performance I feel sorry for remote users.

      • If you agree with Turnbull then you’re as misleading as he is.
        Firstly, there are no “uncapped” satellite plans. That would be impossible to provision given the limited capacity. I agree that the data plan quotas on the interim satellites were far too high for the capacity available but none had an uncapped or unlimited service provided.
        Secondly, you claim that Ku-band satellites could have been launched that would have provided capacity to Australia. But that is just delusional. No private satellite company would dedicate a satellite (necessary to provide the number of spot beams needed for Australia) for such a poor return on investment as the Australian remote user market. If it was viable it would have been done long before the NBNCo announcement. All that we have seen from private satellite firms is a token gesture to the Australian market by having sats with only a few spot beams dedicated to our high population centres. That is completely useless to the market NBNCo is trying to serve in regional and rural Australia.
        When market forces clearly failed to provide the capacity needed for rural Australians our government had no choice but to put out for tender their own sats which were fully optimised with 101 spot beams for serving all of our rural and remote territories with dedicated high capacity. An additional criteria was that there needed to be two sats for redundancy so that if a satellite failed rural Australians wouldn’t be stranded for years without adequate broadband capacity. No private operator would make a commercial loss servicing the rural Australian market let alone launch two sats to lose money twice as fast!
        Thankfully we had a government several years ago that clearly acknowledged the commercial market failure in providing high capacity satellite broadband services to rural Australia and had the balls to do something about it instead of either ignoring the problem or trying to delude Australians that some day commercial market forces would magically come to their rescue.

        • The data allowances were ridiculously grand.

          Satellites have been launched since the quote that could have covered Australia.

          No one claims the provision of satellite capacity would be made without subsidy, just alternative to building your own.

          Nothing inconsistent with Turnbull’s quote.

          • “The data allowances were ridiculously grand.”

            None were unlimited/uncapped as you claim. None were 300+GB which is a typical ADSL plan and hardly “grand”.

            ” Satellites have been launched since the quote that could have covered Australia. ”

            You still don’t get the difference between “covering” a country and providing sufficient capacity. To provide sufficient coverage the design calculations worked out that we needed 101 spot beams on each of two sats to provide sufficient capacity for 10 years after launch.
            Using someone else’s off the shelf sat broadband platform would have only provided a fraction of the spot beams with a resulting fraction of the capacity. The reality is that from the start of the design phase for a custom sat to delivery in final orbit position takes around 4 years. That is how long it takes in the real world. Take the highly customised dual military/civilian Optus C1 sat, that took over 4 years. But if you want to launch a replacement sat that has already been designed, built and tested before it can take as little as 18-24 months. The NBN sats with their custom design have never been built before and are spot on with the typical 4 year time frame. NBNCo didn’t employ clueless Australians to do the economics of which build model would be best, they did the sums and building their own sats was the best option.

            “No one claims the provision of satellite capacity would be made without subsidy, just alternative to building your own.”

            The alternatives were examined in detail when the project began and building their own was the best option. Anyone with an understanding of the capital and maintenance costs of designing, lunching and maintaining a sat would agree with the decision by NBNCo to build their own sats. There isn’t even some political reason to support a domestic commercial satellite operator because we no longer have a domestic satellite building capacity.

            “Nothing inconsistent with Turnbull’s quote.”

            I agree. Your comments are consistent with the delusional comments made by Turnbull. That man may have financially been involved with one of Australia’a first ISP’s but his technical knowledge in the comms industry is terrible and not much better than the average person in the street. He’s only ever been good at debating topics for the sake of winning some preset argument without ever admitting he is wrong. Never trust the man to have a knowledgeable objective unbiased discussion on any topic.

          • NBNCo had no way to measure data used by it’s satellite users (uncapped). Comparing satellite data usage with ADSL plans is ridiculous.

            “NBNCo didn’t employ clueless Australians to do the economics of which build model would be best…”

            Like all NBNCo research it was within constraints of a politicial decision (eg FTTP to multi-dwelling units). Conroy’s solution to everything was build himself, cost overruns everywhere. NBNCo wasn’t clueless, however their failure to meet their own targets is now a matter of historical record.

            “The alternatives were examined in detail when the project began and building their own was the best option.”

            Link and we’ll examine it together. It would be a first for that organisation.

            The interim satellite failure solution failure, at a cost to taxpayers of 3x the Howard Govt per user, can only be a Rudd/Conroy failure. Capacity could have been addressed in many ways, and is other markets around the globe. Better management of existing capacity (measure it first) and satellites scheduled for additional capacity, Turnbull’s quote is spot on.

          • You claim that NBNCo has no way of measuring data used, but I can assure you that yes they do know the data transferred across the link. However it’s up to the RSP’s to limit/throttle/control the data flow which some RSP’s weren’t managing correctly.

            Also, don’t discredit NBNCo’s excellent progress on the satellite project with the terrible performance on FTTP rollout. The sat launches have been recently delayed by a few months due to factory and launch window restrictions but otherwise over the 4 year plan it has met almost every milestone. Of all the FTTP/FW/Sat infrastructure of the NBN only the sat project has come anywhere near meeting the original timeline for delivery.

            As for the interim sat service, the demand just exceeded the supply faster than expected. Sorry, but unlike what you claim there isn’t available capacity to boost capacity to solve the problem for now. The limit on user numbers should have been lower but then you would have heard many people complaining they have been refused sat service which wouldn’t go down well. The cost per user of the interim sat service is higher than before because NBNCo was forced to source extra interim capacity from more expensive sat providers. But it is just an interim sat service and all those issues will go away when the two permanent sats are available.

            If Turnbull had his way he would implement a never ending band aid solution of interim satellite services juggling the most remote Australians from one satellite to another at ever increasing cost totally at the mercy of overseas satellite operators that would milk the Australian government for as much as they can get. Like every pathetic subsidy scheme the Liberal governments have put in place they’ll throw money at contractors to setup terrestrial or satellite communications hardware at a premises then never maintain or manage the service until it falls into disrepair and ends up at a rubbish tip.

        • So no link to the extensive analysis of alternatives?

          The statement about NBNCo unable to measure users’ usage was correct.

          True 6 years later it is difficult to immediately add additional satellite data capacity; neither mine more Turnbull’s quote. The decision to go their own satellite and inoperable data restrictions caused today’s mess; 100% NBNCo’s failure.

          Excellent progress on the Satellite project? They awarded a tender to build satellites and ground stations with a taxpayer money, big deal. We’ll know if they’ve come anywhere near their usual poor standard when it’s operational and (hopefully) we get cost data. Again 3x cost is correct for interim solution.

          @Jason per connection cost double estimates. Drop the delusion.

          @Tinman seriously two delimiter opinion pieces? I get it fanboys love FTTH regardless of cost or delays.

          But none of this changes Turnbull’s quote was correct. Link to alternatives analysis (that I suspect doesn’t exist).

          • Richard, unless you wish to be called a liberal stooge I suggest you stop the “FTTP fan boi” insults.

            Many of us here actually have real world experience in the Telco/isp industry and 1st hand knowledge of exactly how badly our economy needs a long term, high bandwidth, high reliability, ubiquitous FTTP solution.

            Malcolm and Tony are hurting their supposedly core constituents in the business world by wasting billions on technology that should have been rolled out 10-15 years ago when Howard was in power (and fwiw I was a staunch liberal voter in the 90’s & first half of the 2k’s).

  1. “I would suggest that the Minister acknowledge that he was wrong”
    Hey April 1st has come and gone Renai! :P
    Bloody great read once again!!

  2. …and is set to get worse.

    In December when NBN Co took ownership of the Telstra cable network, just days before, Malcolm approved NBN CO doubled the number of Fixed Wireless Towers.

    According to NBN Co’s own report to government – the Fixed Wireless and Satellite Review 20114 – Fixed Wireless only covers 20% premises per tower – the document states “premises unable to acquire a Fixed Wireless signal will be provided Satellite”.

    Many towns formally destined to get FTTN are now in the running to get Fixed Wireless instead – increasing the numbers pushed into satellite.

    That disaster belongs 100% to Malcolm Turnbull.

    Iluka NSW a coastal town once certain to get FTTN, now according to NBN Co “all bets are off” to what they get provided now….

      • Depends how far back you want to go….it was FTTP then FTTN now likely Wireless. Point is, the disaster that Malcolm has set us on is far, far worse than most people realise – by relying so heavily on Fixed Wireless despite knowing how poor it service premises -the satellite system will not be able to keep up – but the sad irony is that now NBN Co has the cable – it COULD have delivered cabled broadband far more extensively than ever before…

        • since the election i have had the distinct impression that the area covered by satellite has in fact been increased also, while the FTTP area has shrunken – which wouldnt do any favours for the load the Interim Sat Service is under.

          In any case, if there were any workarounds put in place, any gain would be marginal if it has been asked to serve more than otherwise would be the case … say, if it were still a majority FTTP build…. arguably its not entirely Malcolms mess, but he certainly hasnt improved things any…

  3. Respectfully making humble requests? Did you tug your forelock while you did it?

    Turnbull is engaging in a very cynical exercise which plays off the reach and impact of the MSM and the short term memory of most of it’s consumers against those with specific interest in the subject and the time and resources to remember, research, and point to the hypocrisy and duplicity of past statements.

    And yes, it’s bloody cynical on his part.

    There is no room for respect, not when such duplicitous behaviour is being displayed. It should be a demand to cut the BS and treat everyone with respect and honesty. But then, Turnbull is a politician and truth seems to desert all those who enter the profession. It’s simply a shame that such an important infrastructure project should fall prey to craven personal and political interests.

  4. (The solution is two satellites which nbn itself will launch itself in 2016.)

    I thought one was being launched this year 2015 what happened ?????

    • No, both 2016,always has been. 2015 was completion of the transit network. But I haven’t heard anything about progress on that for two years. In theory it shouldn’t have been affected by the MTM changes.

      • i am under the impression there was a 6 month delay in the orbital lift for the first one? if my memory hasn’t failed me it was to have been late this year, and now they are both 2016?

        • The group who also had items on said rocket were experiencing delays which was bumping the launch date back or something along those lines (Still think it was 2016 just with better spacing between launches).

  5. There’s another unearthed nugget in Malcolm’s latest utterings of wisdom…

    “you can always make an incremental investment in the core of your network for fixed line – or even fixed wireless – networks to increase capacity,”
    This would hold true for a FIBRE TO THE HOME network, but not the liberal parties version.

    So my question to “the inventor of the internet in Australia” Just what incremental core investment can overcome the laws of physics with regard to transmission of data over copper for the liberal parties preferred FTTN and provide the types of bandwidth growth that are being implied with the recent demand of netflix etc.
    This application alone is highlighting shortcomings in the current network, and belies the liberal parties projection of a sudden reduction in historic bandwidth demand.
    For the sake of convenience, let’s continue to ignore the dismal reality of the true state of Australia’s copper network and assume it is of optimal quality. {real world facts like 10 pair copper cables serving a street with 15 residences might raise even more uncomfortable questions}
    I’d like to know the details of an incremental core investment that would provide such an upgrade to performance on the existing copper network, even granting unrealistic assumptions about it’s actual quality.

      • After rolling out FTTN? I’d love to see the figures that show this would be a cost-effective option, not just the foggy NPV figures in the Strategic Review.

      • “High speeds are only achieved over very short loops. Although G.fast was initially designed for loops shorter than 250 meters, Sckipio in early 2015 demonstrated G.fast delivering speeds over 100 megabits nearly 500 meters and the EU announced a research project.

        Loop lengths in Australia reach up to 1500 metres from the Pillar not including internal premises wiring, to get them under 500 metres would cost more than just running FTTP in the first place.

        • We heard you like nodes in your network.
          So for gfast we will put nodes on your nodes to bring fibre incrementally closer, but famed if we will remove the copper!

  6. Turnbull is a liar.
    He has been lying at every stage of the NBN.
    He has never stopped lying.
    He will never stop lying about the NBN.

  7. Well…Turnbull was originally charged by one Tony to DESTROY the NBN. Those were the words used!
    So, it looks like he has largely succeeded.

  8. I presume those “GHz” figures should be “Gbit/sec”.
    90 Gb/s to 200,000 premises = 450 kbit/sec if everyone tries to use it at the same time (although it is more complicated than this because the capacity is spread across several dozen spot beams, and peak capacity is significantly higher than real capacity which can be rain affected).
    90 Gb/s is a huge step up. At that rate, most users should be able to get at least several Mb/s capacity when they need it. My parents will finally be able to use Skype reliably.

    • It’s also spread across time zones which would make quite a difference I’d think. I’m not sure how likely it is to eventuate in practice, but you’d think there was a clear case for peak / off peak data on NBN satellite services.

    • It is GHz, they are referencing wireless spectrum capacity not data rate. Data rate is dependent on the wireless spectrum, signal to noise, the encoding type and many other factors.

      • No Brendan, the article is clearly incorrect and misleading. The unit of measure that should have been used is Gbps, NOT GHz!
        The numbers are reasonably accurate for Gbps given the current number of 40 MHz wide Ku band transponders that are currently being leased on the two sats. There isn’t currently “6 to 10 GHz of capacity” because current sats operate in the 12 GHz Ku band and have a total of ~500 MHz TOTAL each across 24 transponders with an average of 40 MHz each across the two polarities. NBNCo only leases a small fraction of the capacity (only a few transponders) on Optus/IPStar sats.
        The NBN Sats will operate on the slightly higher Ka band (20 GHz band downlink frequencies) but whilst the modulation frequency of the band is higher the transponder bandwidth is still only in the 100-250 MHz range typical of Ka band sats. The total bandwidth is only a couple of GHz for all the transponders. That is all that the Ka band can provide. So claiming “90 GHz” is just plain wrong because the Ka band only has a total of 2GHz for downlink transmissions (from 18 to 20 GHz).
        Now if you assumed the comment to correctly use “Gbps” unit then that would be correct since NBNCo have stated that each sat will have roughly 80 Gbps throughput and NBNCo currently only lease a couple Gbps of capacity.

      • Davo is correct.
        “90GHz” is in no way a meaningful number in the context of radio communications.
        If we were talking optical fiber, then it might be (each wavelength is dense wavelength division multiplexed fibre systems has a maximum bandwidth of about 100GHz).

      • Also note actual capacity (in Gbps) over most (modern) wireless links (including satellite links) is in the range 4 to 10 times the bandwidth (in GHz), depending modulation, SNR etc.
        90 Gbps of capacity is more than 10 times 2 GHz available because the same frequencies are reused in spot beams focused on different areas of the country.

    • No, the two are linked, but the ghz refers to the underlying bandwidth.
      For instance, when we talk about 2.4ghz wireless having the bandwidth of 54megabits, it is actually talking about a frequency band near 2.4ghz.
      Specifically 20mhz (ie 2400-2420) is 20mhz of bandwidth capable (with Wi-Fi technology over WiFi distances) of 54megabits.

      So saying there is 90ghz of bandwidth doesn’t actually specify a data rate (how you use it determines data rate, with various rules and laws that dictate your theoretical maximums), but they are generally closely related.

      The upshot is there is an additional 200% of bandwidth coming up, which should multiply the total bandwidth available to nbnco by 9 times. (They have 10, they are adding 90).

      Considerations about “speed” are things like how much you allocate to download, vs upload, and a whole heap more that I don’t know or understand because I only know this from my first principals classes from physics and comp sci 10+ years ago.

      • ok, let me try again.
        Virtually all radio communications use carrier frequencies less than 100GHz. The widest bandwidth transmitters/receivers use about 4 GHz of that 100GHz. The radios used for satellite internet have bandwidths up to 2GHz. Most commercial radios (e.g. LTE, WiFi) have bandwidths of 100MHz or less.
        So there is no sense in which “90 GHz” is a meaningful number here.
        On the other hand, 90 Gbps matches quite closely with the total peak data rate supported by the satellites.

        • Actually, 5 GHz is the common standard at the moment (check any modern wireless phone).

          GHz is the basic underpinning medium for data transport (think of it as the “fibre vs copper” of the transport layer), the higher the GHz, the more data you can transfer (with the proviso that lower GHz has better “wall” penetration).

          • You’ve missed the point david was trying to make, referring to the channel bandwidth of transmitters/receivers, not the modulated centre frequency of the band being used. It is the channel bandwidth that determines the data rate available not what carrier frequency the baseband channel is modulated up to.
            Sure 802.11a and 802.11ac Wi-fi uses frequencies in the 5GHz band (actually 5.0-5.8 GHz) but the standard only has maximum channel bandwidth in that range of 160 MHz. Mobile phones only use those frequencies for local wireless lan access but wide area cell phone access in this country only uses modulated frequencies up to 2.6 GHz, however the maximum LTE channel bandwidth is still a very low 20 MHz each.

            Ku band (12GHz) satellites have a transponder channel bandwidth typically of 36 MHz and typically only ~20 transponder channels or at most ~50 for very large sats are included due to solar power budget limits. Ka band sats have channel bandwidths of 250-500MHz each but there are only up to 6 transponders (the entire Ka downlink band has available bandwidth of 2.1 GHz between 17.7 and 20.2 GHz so you can’t have any more high bandwidth channels unless you use the special military only Ka band frequencies).
            The quoted “90GHz” is a totally useless figure which neither represents the modulated frequency band used by Ka band sats or the transponder channel band or even the aggregate transponder channel bandwidth combined!
            The original person did mean to say “90Gbps” not “90GHz” so get over it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

      • No one with any clue is saying there is “90 GHz of bandwidth”. That is an error.
        The lower frequency limit for Ka band downlinks is 17.7 GHz. The upper frequency limit is 20.2 GHz. After you take out the 400 MHz allocated for Iridium feeder links (19.3-19.7GHz) you’re left with a total downlink frequency bandwidth of 2.1 GHz. Even combined the NBN 1a and 1b sats won’t use all of that 2.1 GHz available to them from their orbit slot, but that is more than enough bandwidth to provide 80 Gbps capacity each or 160 Gbps total.
        Whilst each NBN sat will have 101 spot beams to have redundant cover across Australia allowing that spectrum to be re-used, you can’t just multiply the actual frequency channels used by the number of spot beams. You need significant spatial separation for frequency use on different spot beams otherwise interference will occur. But even if you did multiply the frequency re-use by the actual bandwidth used the number would not be meaningful. The actual data throughput in Mbps or Gbps allocated for each spot beam area and the total aggregate data rate are far more meaningful numbers. NBNCo haven’t released any details as to what data rate each of the spot beams will be allocated and that will be an important detail that would reveal true performance levels of the new sats.

      • Huh? It is totally critical for fibre just as much as it is for wireless. It’s just that optical uses not only greater channel bandwidths but also modulated channel frequencies.
        Typical optical channel frequency bandwidths are up to 70 GHz at the moment and these are wavelength division multiplexed at different modulated frequencies in the infrared optical spectrum which have frequencies in the 1 THz to 400 THz range (1000-400,000 GHz).
        There is currently a significant amount of spectrum that isn’t used between the top end of the radio spectrum at 100 GHz and the bottom end of the infrared spectrum at ~1000GHz due to limitations of how we can modulate and transmit those frequencies.

      • Guys, you’re just being pedantic, the higher the frequency, the higher the bandwidth, regardless of the medium…

        • And with that statement Tinman you have clearly demonstrated why being “pedantic” differentiates what is incorrect or correct!
          Sorry but making a general statement that “the higher the frequency, the higher the bandwidth, regardless of medium” is not correct unless you qualify it further. Only when you have a higher baseband frequency will you have higher bandwidth. The baseband width determines the channel bandwidth when it is modulated up to higher carrier frequencies. If you mistakenly compared the modulated centre carrier frequencies then that in no way represents the bandwidth of the transmission channel. A case in point is that a GSM GMSK data channel operating at 1.8 GHz does not have greater bandwidth than a LTE data channel operating at 0.7 GHz. But if you applied your statement then you would mistakenly think otherwise.

  9. Satellites are not the way forward for NBN as it is not possible to get close to the bandwidth provided by optical cable.

    • The key word for Labors use of the Satellite Service is of course ‘Interim’. It was only intended as a stopgap measure for those with no or desperately poor internet services before the NBN FTTP could be built proper in their area.

      Of course, being that satellites can transmit data, they slot perfectly in the category of ‘technology’ when considering the Multi Technology Mix (aka Malcolm Turnbulls’ Mess).

      Hell, MT may have even been … well I hesitate to use the word ‘right’, but something approximating somewhat less than completely wrong when stating there wasn’t a need for more satellites – because they were only temporary back then. Now that we’re building more because they are to become permanent fixtures, OF COURSE the existing capacity isn’t enough. They were never designed to service as many as they will be servicing now.

      • AIUI FTTP was never going to be installed in the satellite areas, only some parts of the FW areas where Quigley was going to use cost-savings to do so.

  10. As a resident of Peel NSW which is only 10 mins from Bathurst we have satellite internet which everyone one has to agree is crap, why cant this government revisit the wireless debate for those areas that are not the desired population but so close to large cities that wireless can be installed in those villages in the out lying areas that when help putting undue stress on the satellite networks and be more upgradable being land based systems. Yet so close but yet so far.
    The cost of changing us form on satellite network to the next would cost a lot of money instead of get installing one wireless tower for our village of Peel.
    Come on NBN wake up.

  11. “Firstly, I would suggest that the Minister acknowledge that he was wrong in his statements in Opposition about existing satellite capacity in Australia being able to meet the needs of the NBN project.”

    Hell will freeze over before TurnBull ever admits he is wrong about anything, sad but true. :-(

    “When these two NBN satellites are launched, there will be huge spare capacity on them. Once again, the NBN is investing more than is needed to achieve its mission”

    Once again this sort of statement from TurnBull proves he and the Libs do not understand how to plan for the future – now that the future is here he has been shown to be 100% wrong and incapable of understanding how to plan for future capacity needs. We only need to see his coming MtM debacle to see additional proof that this is not a once off “oversight”.

    • Once again this sort of statement from TurnBull proves he and the Libs do not understand how to plan for the future

      Actually, that’s been pretty obvious since the Howard years really :)

  12. Why on earth should you offer “humble suggestions” to the minister??

    How about “demand frickin’ honesty” from no good, 2 bit lying politicians who are supposed to be leading our country forward.

    • +1 TurnBull is constantly lying about the NBN and its history, I’ve personally had waaaay more than enough of it!

  13. I’m sorry Liberals you are solely to blame for SELLING TELSTRA and OPPOSING THE NBN during opposition and now delaying any kind of rollout for ideology reasons to kill fibre.

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