NBN Co to add 9000 Interim Satellite customers

NBN Co will add a further 9000 spots to the Interim Satellite Service (ISS) while expanding bandwidth available to customers on the service, Comms Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced last week.

NBN Co stopped taking orders for the interim service in January this year, after the service reached capacity in mid-December 2013.

ISP iiNet, which serves up plans based on the satellite service, stopped taking on new ISS customers in November last year. The company said the sheer number of people using the service at the time (42,000), combined with transmission capacity constraints, was causing “severe service quality issues”.

Speaking to ABC journalist Ali Moore last week, Turnbull said of the current state of the service: “We’ve now got only 44,000 people using it and instead of getting 6 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, they’re getting, at peak times, dial-up.”

To improve the quality of the service, Turnbull said NBN Co will spend $18.4 million on acquiring additional capacity, which will increase the bandwidth available to each user by about a third.

NBN Co will also employ new monitoring tools to control bandwidth “so that bandwidth hogs, very high volume users are not going to be able to shunt everybody else off to barely getting dial-up”, Turnbull said.

“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.”

Turnbull said that most of the ISS’s customers are on the outskirts of big cities, and that eligibility for the satellite service would be tightened “so that it’s for people who really need it and we’re going to have about 9000 new spots available”.

These new spots will be funded by a subsidy scheme.

“That will be in the order of $2000 subsidy for equipment and that will enable another 9000 people to get access to an interim satellite service.”