Optus has sought to meet concerns raised by regional councils over the likely quality of NBN satellite services, drawing on its own weight of expertise in the area to argue how the end-user experience could be optimised. Meanwhile, the firm itself remains ready to work with NBN regarding satellite business, with a local satellite team boasting centuries of experience between them, and the unique position of being a domestic telco with its own fleet of spacecraft.
Western Queensland shires last week slammed as “disastrous” government plans to “relegate” their populations to satellite links under the NBN; Barcoo and Diamantina were sufficiently alarmed at the prospect to commit almost A$3 million of their own funds to kickstarting local fibre spurs, highlighting latency as
their chief concern. However, during a tour of Optus’ Belrose satellite ground facility in NSW, head of satellite sales Peter Williams attempted to put some context around the issue of satellite latency.
“[The spacecraft are] 36,000km away, so at the speed of light, it takes 125ms to go up, so 250ms to get up and down; it’s not too bad,” Williams told CommsDay. “And there are a number of things to do about satellite broadband to improve the user experience.
There are acceleration techniques, spoofing techniques that we build into the offering, pre-caching so the user experience is actually very good... remember that even on a 100Mbps [terrestrial connection], it can still take a couple of seconds when you click on a website for it to [display].”
In terms of throughput, Williams was also confident that satellite connections would perform well across the last few per cent of Australians outside the reach of fibre or terrestrial wireless. “It comes down to congestion, and how much tension is in the network – user experience will vary depending on how it’s been set up by the wholesaler, and how many people are on it at a time, in much the same way that a DSLAM can be congested in an exchange,” he noted. “It comes down to the dimensioning, and how you choose to set it up... if it’s dimensioned well, then it should be a good experience.”
But headline speeds aren’t the only asset that the firm holds in the local satellite market. As the only telco with its own satellite fleet out of Australia, the cadre of veteran staff in Optus’ Belrose facility combine hundreds of years of experience in satellite control between them, both for Optus’ own fleet and via subcontracting arrangements to provide tracking facilities for other satellite launches 76 so far, with two more planned this year and has developed most of the control software in-house, from the operating system on up.
