With the Sky Muster satellite now benefiting some of the most regional and remote locations across the country, the NBN has announced Sky Muster II is set to take to the skies in October.
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Taking off from French Guiana Space Centre in South America, it is set to orbit 36,000km into the sky and is one of the world’s largest communications satellites, weighing in at 6,400kgs.
The NBN says that following the launch of their first satellite late last year, Sky Muster II will help bridge Australia’s digital divide by delivering world-leading broadband services to 400,000 regional and remote homes and businesses across Australia.
Since the first nbn rocket launched in October 2015, peak industry bodies report the revolutionary service is having a profound impact on regional farmers and agribusiness across the country, enabling farmers to harness the latest technologies, make smart decisions for their business, and collaborate with others anywhere, anytime.
NBN Satellite Architect, Julia Dickinson, said Sky Muster was a “game changer” for people living in remote Australia.
“A lot of farms and businesses are already benefitting from increased access to global markets,” Ms Dickinson.
“Same with telehealth, education services. People who want to live remotely are able to do thing people take for granted in the cities so it is already delivering those benefits.”
Ms Dickinson said together the two satellites would cover the footprint of 400,000 Australians premises.
“Together they will provide a 135 gigabytes per second capacity and we can split the services between the two.”
Access to Sky Muster is already available to eligible customers and this week an NBN delegation to Cloncurry Council this week told the council that fixed line NBN services for people in Cloncurry township would be coming next year.
The NBN delegates told council work to connect 1900 premises in town would start in 2017 to deliver fixed line NBN with wireless NBN available to outlying areas.
NBN will be fibre to the node (FTTN) so the company will build FTTN cabinets each serving around 350 premises with copper wire taking the service to the home, providing 25 megabytes per second (mbps) download speed.