In a recent interview with the ABC, Federal Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has outlined plans to upgrade the satellite services currently available to some premises that cannot access fixed line or mobile broadband.
Mr Turnbull said that the NBN Co will spend $18.4 million on acquiring additional capacity to increase the bandwidth available to each current interim satellite user by about a third.
New monitoring tools are also planned, to better control the use of capacity so that certain users cannot dominate the available bandwidth to the detriment of others.
“So we believe in terms of the 44,000 odd people that are on it at the moment this will now mean that they will be able to do their email, do their internet banking, they should be able to Skype during peak periods, and that will upgrade the user experience,” said Mr Turnbull.
Mr Turnbull also says that barring incidents the new long-term NBN satellite should be in position at the end of 2015.
However, as “…people are not all going to be able to jump on it immediately, there is obviously got to be a transition”, therefore “there is an advantage in improving the quality of the interim satellite service and making some extra spaces available because then that makes the transition over to the long term satellites more ordered”.
The full interview is available here.
