Maybe.
I believe it was a certain prime minister of Australia, by the name of Turnbull, who when it came to NBN in the bush, maintained one Skymuster GEO would all that would be needed.
City slicker. Well we got another one, really as a backup.
We need more. And the technology is decades proven. And launch costs have never been cheaper.
Isnât it so good to see so many people have got their priorities right.
Sadly you have forgotten or choosing to ignore the facts of how great a service like this for rural people and travellers and what it brings to them other than Netflix/streaming services.
If you had lived in a rural/outback situation then you would truly appreciate what Starlink services bring to people.
The other issue with Skymuster they wouldnât allow portable two way units.
PS The reality is that even if Skymuster delivered the marketing speed, it would still be quite a lot slower (bandwidth) than Starlink.
People who have only just joined the 21st century are going to take a lot of convincing to go back to the 20th century because you donât like swarms of thousands of LEO satellites.
Yeah, not that hard. I would guess that a Skymuster dish is fine-tuning aligned by using feedback from the signal strength, whereas I would guess that Starlink dishes have knowledge of the ephemeris of all the Starlink satellites.
Yes, Skymuster could manage automatic alignment but it would give up one of the benefits of the Skymuster dish i.e. the simplicity of no moving parts. Itâs one less thing to fail. The Skymuster dish is only aligned once, so why take on the complexity?
I think you have it somewhat the wrong way around.
Skymuster satellites are in a fixed equatorial position, so once the antenna has been pointed at that location, no change is required.
Same with Foxtel.
Now if you are a mobile user, once in a new position the antenna will need to be reaimed. But what has changed is your location. So with an auto system, enter the new lat and long and bingo. Or do it manually.
On the other hand, continuously moving satellites like MEO GPS or LEO Starlink, Iridium, Globalstar need to be tuned into on a continuous basis. The antenna could be moving to track the satellites, or constantly signal tuning to find a good source.
Space based cell networks in reverse in essence. The tranceivers are moving, the end terminal may or not be.
Or we are just not understanding each other?
Yes. However there has to be a process to get the antenna pointed correctly in the first place (done by the tech who is installing the dish).
Nah. Built-in GNSS receiver. (I donât know whether either tech uses that but that is surely better than entering it manually for the price, power consumption and size of a GNSS receiver chip.)
GNSS receiver? I donât care about the Russian Glonass or Euro Galileo.
Your latitude and longitude are on any decent map, or GPS built into any mobile device these days.
Time to hijack this post for a bad joke. I saw a biography of Mercator on sale today. Nearly bought it, but then I figured I could pretty much project what it said.
However if you are e.g. Starlink and you want to sell your service globally and you donât care to have different models for different countries or regions of the world (which sucks for consumer and company alike) then it is better to have a single chip that can do all the major GNSSs.
Obviously that is not a consideration for the average Skymuster installation.
GROAN! That was AWFUL! LOL
Now I appreciate your need for remote comms. And something reliable and affordable.
It does not take a lot of bandwidth to supply voice, or email, or simple Internet access. Even video streaming of SDT worked perfectly well over my old ADSL and now NBN. Or 4g portable cell device. 10 Mbs plenty for HD streaming.
So why would a normal user need 100Mpbs plus as delivered by Starlink? You would never need that but means thousands of space pests have to be in orbit to serve the very few who seem to want it.
Do you need 100Mpbs?
Any normal user will want to apply software updates. These days that can be 1 GB+. A full Linux iso is more like 3.5 GB. Frustration and inefficiency is inversely proportional to bandwidth.
The official Skymuster download speeds are 12 Mbit/sec and 25 Mbit/sec. Even if Skymuster actually delivered the higher speed of those two plans, that could still be 12 times slower than Starlink (at its best, or maybe 8 times slower than Starlink at a typical speed), so everything takes 12 times longer (8 times longer) to download on Skymuster. Skymuster quotes the âtypical evening speedsâ as 7 Mbit/sec and 15 Mbit/sec respectively which is why
It is sometimes recommended that Skymuster users use an offline downloader
but that is something of an indictment of Skymuster.
I remember discussions with colleagues along the lines of âdoes anyone really need a HDD bigger than 10MBâ (circa 1988)? Look how far we have come when finding any HDD less than 500GB is possible but can be challenging. The big box products standardized on 1TB years ago because they could not get smaller ones in the volume they required.
A conclusion is the answer will come in its own time.
Yeah right. In the middle of nowhere I think now is the time to download a complete distro of Linux. 
If someone lives in the middle of nowhere, and some do, when is a better time than when required, eg maybe ânowâ? Being dismissive of othersâ needs, wants (whether or not one agrees they are just wants instead of needs) and circumstances is never a good look.
In addition to what @PhilT said, âthe middle of nowhereâ is less ânowhereâ than you think. As a cost saving measure on the part of the government, over the years, areas that were slated to get Fixed Wireless have had Fixed Wireless withdrawn from the planning - so that the only option was Skymuster until Starlink came along.
So you donât have to be on a sheep station, a 400 km round trip from the nearest small town, in order that your only option was Skymuster.
Linux distro was just an example.
A larger update of one of the âOfficeâ components on an iPhone can be 500 MB. Thatâs 500 MB per component, per iPhone. (So, family of 4, times 3 components, thatâs 6GB right there. And by definition when Apple drops one of those, there will be a lot of other iPhone customers doing the same updates at the same time.)
The point is ⊠whether you run Microsoft, Apple or Linux ⊠just keeping your software up to date is a lot of large downloads ⊠and I would certainly recommend that you keep your software up to date, because of the prevalence of exploits and scams, whether you live on a sheep station, on a ânowhereâ in Australia that has been consigned by NBNno to Skymuster-only, or in a metro area, or anywhere else.
One of the problems here is that the IT world is designed around the assumption that everyone has decent internet, whether thatâs bloated overengineered web sites or bloated overengineered software.
So if you are the woman above who is getting 19 kbit/sec from Skymuster, web sites are utterly unworkable but even if Skymuster got its act together and managed to deliver 5 Mbit/sec consistently, web sites and software downloads would still be unpleasant.
Where does a product like StarLink fit in?
More than 400,000 Australian premises (est 1 million Aussies) fall in the NBN satellite footprint. Of these only 1 in 4 have signed up. Itâs a clear indication of just how poor the NBN delivered service is compared with that provided to urban Aussies where 3 in every 4 premises have signed on. Many of the 1 in 4 urban Aussies who have not signed up to the NBN will have alternate access to reasonable priced mobile data and speeds.
Itâs reassuring consumers who make up a small part of Australiaâs population have somewhere to share their experiences, discuss solutions, and politely express frustration.
Agree that speeds in the kilobits is completely useless these days.
But I had all the bandwidth I needed when on ADSL and now on a basic NBN lowest speed tier. And that included big Windows downloads, Ubuntu downloads, and I do a lot of music and video streaming from Youtube.
That capacity one can get from NBN various delivery means including Skymuster, or 4G mobile data.
Thank you all for you input into this topic. The posts appear to have reached an end of the main line and are branching into who needs what speed.
In light of this, the topic has been closed and may be reopened if new and compelling reasons again exist to reopen it. If nothing compelling emerges the topic will likely remain closed.
