Since launching in Australia in 2021, Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service has become an indispensable part of the national telecoms network.
More than 200,000 Australians in remote and regional areas rely on the company for their internet, while emergency services are embracing the technology.
Fire trucks and police cars around the country are being fitted with Starlink satellite dishes. Defence plans to install Starlink on 50 naval vessels.
State and federal departments and agencies have spent more than $50 million on Starlink hardware and services in the past three years, public tender websites show. The biggest contracts have all come in the last year.
“Starlink is a double-edged sword,” says Paul Budde, a telecommunications analyst.Malcolm Davis, a defence strategy analyst at the Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which is partly funded by the Department of Defence, sees Starlink as a “positive”, but is worried the country could become too reliant on a single operator.
“[We could] become totally dependent on Starlink for internet services, whether civilian or defence.”
“In a crisis, he could deny us access.”
How Starlink conquered Australia
Australia is particularly suited to satellite internet.
Its large area and low population density means most of the country’s land mass has no mobile reception.
Mobile networks provide connectivity to 99.5 per cent of the population, but only 30 per cent of the land mass, says Luke Coleman, CEO of the Communications Alliance industry body.
“That last 0.5 per cent of population is 70 per cent of the land mass.”Starlink, which is a member of the Communications Alliance, launched in Australia in 2021.
It arrived to great expectation. The existing National Broadband Network’s SkyMuster satellite internet service used two satellites in geostationary orbit (GEO), some 35,000km above the Earth’s surface. Customers complained of slow speeds.But Starlink’s satellites were in low-Earth orbit (LEO), or about 10 times closer to users, meaning signals have less distance to travel and the service can be faster.
“Starlink offered much lower latency and much higher [data] capacities,” Mr Coleman says.
“We are seeing people in regional Australia voting with their wallets and choosing to pay a premium for those services.”
Over three years, Starlink bled the NBN of hundreds of thousands of customers.
