Loral set to build NBN Co satellites

Eh? Singapore?

Get a grip Natalie.

Singapore is the size of the Chadstone Shopping Centre* with a population density that approaches shopper numbers on Christmas Eve.

A bloke with a goat powered cart and a hand shovel could cable up Singapore in the afternoon and still be home for tea**

I once had to sit through a meeting with some Singapore based execs just after Singtel purchased Optus, and they made the same ridiculous comparisons then, suggesting that it shouldn't be much trouble to connect up a massive percentage of Australians to the Optus network and wondering why it hadn't already been done.

As for this ridiculous satellite business, how much are they expecting to charge for this service? They are only going to service 200K people so for $620M that comes out to $3.5K per person and this does not take into account;

- The cost of the bidirectional satellite ground station required for each site

- The inevitable cost blow out

- Ongoing operating costs

- There will absolutely not be a 100% take up.

Who exactly is going to pay for this white elephant? As usual the poor suffering taxpayer has to pay up, with a bit extra on top so the assholes in Canberra can give themselves another payrise for a job well done .

Like every other policy that this utterly inept bunch of clueless cretins have put forth, this is bound to be a complete and utter disaster and a total embarrassment for the country. ***

* a massive exaggeration of course

** another massive exaggeration

*** Not an exaggeration at all

A satellite user in Oz

I use satellite here in Aus. for my internet.

The comments above are quite correct, it is expensive, it is slow and it is laggy.

I am using the IPstar satellite with the old Aus. Broadband Guarantee setup.

Tomorrow I get a new system from NBN. It will still be over IPstar but will be 1M up and 6M down, the latency from all reports is around 600ms, somewhat better than the 1000+ ms I get now.

For the same money as I pay now I get an extra 2g per month of download capacity.

My other choice for internet is dialup.

Once the new satellites are launched we can expect 2 up and 12 down speed initially with increases later (to what I don't know), it is also expected that data charges will reduce considerably so that instead of the current 8g per month max we will be able to afford somewhat more. Currently I have a total of 6g available to me each month unless I buy more data capacity which is horrnedously expensive.

What people fail to realise is that NBN is funded from loans, during its life it is expected that NBN will repay those loans whilst at the same time cross subsidise the lossy satellite service with the proceeds from the wireless and fibre services it will offer.

If all of this comes to pass, the satellite service will not become a drain on the taxpayer, it will be subsidised by other users buying different services which will be competitively priced with existing ADSL products.

I understand people being cynical about all of this, it is headed up by governement after all. But, if all comes true, it'll be pretty bloody good. If the politicos interfere in an attempt to make it better, it will become an expensive and major cock up.

singapore

Natalie - Singapore's broadband network is neither government owned (although it is government subsidised) nor most importantly is it a monopoly. there remains facilities based competition.