Satellite broadband users all over Queensland have spent most of this year being “shaped” and cut off at the knees in their businesses and home schoolrooms and say the fast internet experience offered by last week’s Sky Muster satellite launch can’t come soon enough.
The satellite is described as one of the world’s most advanced and its owners, NBN say it will play a critical role in covering around 95,000 Queenslanders with speeds never before seen in the bush.
For Sarah and Fred Hughes at Lake Nash on the Queensland/NT border, it can’t come soon enough.
They pay for three internet plans for their outstation, staff quarters and their home office and have seen the three services cut from 180GB to 90GB and then be throttled back to 60GB in total, and be slowed right down.
“We get hundreds of emails a day but we had a period recently where we had to shut down for two weeks,” Sarah said. “This is a business turnover of $10m – of course that affects productivity.”
It was a similar story for Peter Anderson, Strathmore’s farm manager at Georgetown.
“When you’re trying to grow a business, with 30 to 40 staff, and you can’t provide for them, you end up with no staff,” he said. “You can’t even provide services for them such as electronically paying their wages.
“I have to wait until night time when speeds are up, to do things like search for secondhand dozers for sale. Then I can’t ring because everything is shut. It all costs us.”
Photographer Fiona Lake lives in Townsville now but said she wouldn’t have been able to operate her business when she lived at Richmond, because of snail-pace internet speeds.
“I have heard of people in the Territory who drive to roadhouses with the property’s bookwork on the seat beside them, to work in their car using a mobile hotspot. These are people running multi-million dollar businesses.”
While welcoming expected improvements, she had reserves about how much it would cost rural users.
“I’m sceptical of putting all your eggs in one basket,” she said.
Regional Development Australia regional chairman Paul Woodhouse was just as wary, saying there were concerns that all users would be able to have limited access, including people able to use normal broadband services.
“This is a good step in the right direction but I believe we will again be needing more capacity in five years,” he said.
About 2000 premises currently on the interim satellite service are eligible for NBN fixed wireless service.
