Australia’s NBN could switch to LEO from GEO
February 19, 2025
By Chris Forrester
Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN), which trades as ‘Aussie Broadband’, currently uses geostationary satellites to beam broadband signals to businesses, government and private individual across Australia, says it could switch from geostationary to low Earth (LEO) orbiting satellites.
Currently NBN uses capacity (Sky Muster) from two craft at 140 and 145 degrees East.
Local reports say that NBN is increasingly struggling to serve customers and their expectations for high-speed connectivity and in particular to manage video. One report says that NBN is “haemorrhaging customers to Starlink”.
NBN’s new chief executive, Ellie Sweeney, defended a potential move into LEO, saying: “We’re a statutory infrastructure provider, so we need to be able to provide customers who are currently served today by GEO with an alternative and the logically next step is LEO,” she said, adding: “To give you some context, we have 83,000 customers on GEO satellite today”.
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