NBN Co snubs Elon, inks satellite deal with Bezos' Amazon
Amazon's Project Kuiper will offer city-quality broadband to about 300,000 rural and regional Australian premises from the middle of 2026, via a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation of more than 3000 satellites.
The deal promises high-quality broadband for rural and regional Australia, and means NBN Co will phase out its current ageing Sky Muster satellites by the early 2030s. Sky Muster had been providing broadband across remote areas of Australia but had been criticised by users for offering inferior speeds to traditional fixed-line broadband and newer rival satellite options such as Musk's Starlink.
'Today we can announce that NBN has reached agreement with Amazon's Project Kuiper to deliver city-quality broadband to remote Australia,' Communications Minister Anika Wells told journalists at a North Sydney press conference on Tuesday.
'The agreement will deliver high-speed broadband to regional, rural and remote Australia via Low Earth Orbit satellites, meaning Australians living anywhere will be better off, whether that is working from home, managing a regional business, accessing telehealth, video conferencing or online learning.'
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NBN Co chief executive Ellie Sweeney said the government-owned company had carried out a rigorous selection process before deciding to partner with Amazon. Starlink, co-founded by Musk in 2019, has racked up more than 200,000 customers Australia-wide to date. Last week it suffered a global network outage that lasted for more than two hours.
'We're the default provider, so it's incumbent on us to be able to provide broadband access across Australia,' Sweeney said. 'We went through a pretty rigorous and a pretty compelling RFI [request for information] and RFP [request for proposal] process to provide wholesale broadband access via Low Earth Orbit.
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