Australia's Great Linux-Based Satellite Network

yBshy4 writes "This article may interest the Slashdot folk. LinuxWorld Australia is reporting on Australia's largest satellite network, covering some 800,000 square kilometres, or most of the state of New South Wales, has gone live. The network consists of 75 Linux-based satellite routers that provide Wi-Fi (802.11b) connectivity to country towns that are unable to get DSL. The routers are engineered by Ursys and run Debian providing gateway services such as DNS and mail. According to the article, Ursys chose Debian 'because of its packaging support, which facilitates the ability to push updates to the routers remotely.' Ursys tried to use Windows but it was 'too unstable.' Hopefully this is an important step to providing better Internet access to regional areas across Australia. Anyone know of similar Internet access projects around the world?"

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Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[qtothemax]

$3,500au=$2,658.50us or 2,171.13 euros. Pretty pricy

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[Agent Orange]

It is very expensive, no matter what currency it's in. Standard cable/broadband connections cost somewhere between $40-80/month, with transfer caps of 500MB - a couple GB/month. Plus there's all the usual jockeying with numbers, rolling over bandwidth and the games you'd expect. But this is a satellite-based service, so you're paying for the infrastructure.

Looks like they're using ISDN for upstream and satellite for downstream - did I read this right?

It's a shame they can't leverage the bandwidth of AARNET, which has fibre running right down the newell highway (N-S in country NSW). This is academic stuff and I wouldn't expect that the economics would add up in country NSW for commerical ventures - just not enough people care about the internet there.

From someone who actually supports these things...

[arduous]

As an IT consultant (and formerly an ISP guy) I am doing the end-customer support and installations for one of these POP's on the VIC/NSW border.

The Ursys guys run their own internal APT repository that all the BusiBox's update from (Yes, the BusiBox's are just normal rackmount PC's), allowing then to easy automate updates.

Their "web interface" is just a custom version of webmin.

I have no idea what the $3500/month for 1GB is about. I dont deal with the billing side at all.

But the service appears to work well. I am looking forward to see how much range we can get out here with the 802.11b gear, as ADSL is unlikely to come to most of these towns for many years.

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[mcbridematt]

Very true. Australian bandwidth stinks. Sure, the Southern Cross Cable [southerncrosscables.com] linking Oceania with the U.S is pretty phat, but it's costs are too big. ISP's here tend to run transparent proxies (I have a ADSL ISP blacklist of ISP's I won't go with for that reason. At least my dialup ISP, iPrimus [iprimus.com.au] isn't stupid enough) in order to keep costs down. Well, instead of trying to cut costs on the ISP side, why don't they try to make Australian->US bandwidth less expensive?

It's probably cheaper to dump a server in a US colo [theplanet.com] facility overall than dump it in a Australian colo [host1.com.au] and watch yourself get Slashed/Farked no matter what your primary demographic for your website is :(

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's at least as expensive as GPRS (~2.1e/MB).

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[pe1chl]

Depends on what DSL you have, and what you call "better".

Here in the Netherlands, standard DSL service via the ex-state-monopoly DSL provider pings at about 10ms nationally and 160ms to the USA (west coast).

This is not bad and completely unachievable via satellite, because of laws of physics.

For any geostationary satellite solution you need to add 260ms for one-way and double that for two-way solutions, plus any delays incurred by time-division multiplexing (if applicable).
That is a huge increase compared to the above numbers.

The only satellite solution that can be faster is a LEO constellation.

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[Jack Porter]

Yeah, that policy sure seems to be affecting the 50Mbps internet connection I have at my apartment here in Seoul, South Korea.

I have no bandwidth limits and it costs me about $US30 a month. There is a transproxy in the middle for HTTP, but I can still BitTorrent at 500KB-1MB/second. And for HTTP stuff that hits the transproxy cache, I regularly get 4-5 MegaBYTES a second.

I'm an Australian who's been living in the US and now Korea. The price of wholesale bandwidth in the Australia is insane and has barely decreased in the 5 years since I left...

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[gassendi]

I think it's just badly written. My take on it is that it's bandwidth not download limits. So it's probably 1 gigabit connection. The article says "can be shared between 12 to 20 people for "normal" Web access". I suppose 1/20th of a gigabit connection is "normal" access.

Also if you look at http://www.nswnet.net/rurallink/costs/
you'll see they quote AUD$189.00 for a 1GB download limited connection.

Re:Does Australia have a Universal Access Fund?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Universal Service Agreement with this is part of, only covers voice calls and modem speeds upto 28kbps (??) and until a couple of years ago only covered 9600 bps.

Australia Communication Authority - [aca.gov.au]
Universal Service Obligation

Looking at the scheme more cynically, it is designed to provide Flo average citizen from Wagga Wagga with the impression that the government is protecting her from the Big Bad Telco's (Telstra is 51% owned by the Federal Government). Its primary aim is to cover the un-timed local calls. Calls that cost Telstra virtually nothing, and are quite profitable due to the high flag fall charge.

Re:Australia is useless when it comes to Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Errr, I'm on 1500/256 ADSL and I get 16GB/month download allowance (which is MORE than I'll ever need) and I pay $89/month, oh, and it's a month-to-month contract. Where did you get your information from? Even with other ISPs like TPG you can get a flat-rate 512/128 connection for less than what I pay. Where abouts in America are you from?

Re:Australia is useless when it comes to Internet

[dojobi]

I don't know which ISP you're with, but I'm on 1500/256 for AU$80. After you hit your 10GB limit, you're just bandwidth shaped to 72kb/s rather than charged per MB. I lived in Boston last year and this was pretty comparable to what I was paying there.

This is who I'm with - iinet [iinet.net.au]

Australias got some pretty big nets like this...

[Anonymous Coward]

For what its worth, http://www.latis.net.au uses around 200 linux based satellite routers to cover an area of some 1,349,130 sq km (520,902 sq miles) or so to provide internet services to primary and secondary schools across the Northern Territory in Australia...

For comparisons sake, the American state of Texas covers about 267,277 sq. miles (about 692,244 sq km)

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[Dylbert]

I can safely say that it is supposed to be $35.00 instead of $3500.

A mere typo. AUD$35/month for 1gb sounds about right according to telstra's new rates.

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[Marlor]

"$3500 per month for 1GB per month"
Now surely that's in Australian currency, but that still sounds expensive to me.

From what I can see, $3,464 is the annual cost for an entire town to join the RuralLink network. It would be expected that the costs would then be dispersed among "member institutions" within the town (e.g. schools, libraries, and other public institutions).

Once it is shared across a group of institutions, the cost is not all that prohibitive, although it is $171 per month extra for a 3 gigabyte limit, and $150 per gigabyte after that.

Also, the usage is subsidised so that it is virtually free for the first year, and significantly cheaper for two years after that.

This is not targetted at home users. It is for small towns who currently have no other option than dial-up. It is certainly expensive compared to what is available in most parts of Australia, but there are few other options available for institutions in "outback" towns to get high-speed internet.

More pricing information is available here [nswnet.net]

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[SlightOverdose]

Not to mention telstra's new cheap broadband plan has a 200mb download limit, after which you are charged 0.15c/mb. Off the top of my head that comes to something like a possible monthly usage bill of over $24,000 for a 512k plan. And yes, this has happened in the past and telstra has sent debt collection agencies after every last cent, even when the traffic was generated by worms.

This from the same company that advertises "cheap" mobile phone calls for only 25c- a quick glance and you think 25c per minute, but no, it's 25c per 30 seconds. And of course that rate is only available sometimes (i.e. "Never"). The normal rate turns out to be $1/minute.

On top of the .25c call connection fee.

So instead of the nice cheap .25c/minute you think your getting, your actually paying four times that. Plus the cost of your monthly mobile phone rental. All because of deceptive advertising.

They force people into 24 month plans with exceptionally good deals and change the plan halfway through (uncapped, unmetered 10mbit cable for $69/month. Until we decide to cap it at 10gigs. And have "technical errors" slowing the network 70% of the time. And oops, our mail servers don't work. Sorry about that. We don't care- your stuck on this crap for 2 years)

If you took Microsoft, Real, SCO, De Beers, and the Russian Mafia, and rolled them all into one big monopoly, they would still be less evil than telstra.

Re:The article text is incorrect

[VikingBrad]

The article is wrong, the AU$3,500 is an annual figure for 1GB of data per month including the Linux router and network management.

see NSW Net Costs document [nswnet.net]

Still not cheap but OK for remote rural areas that can't get ADSL. Note the Linux router suppliers make a good proportion of it ($1K pa).

Cheers
VikingBrad

Re:How's this work?

[include($dysmas)]

you get a downpoint dish that talks to the satellite via mm-microwave i presume and a little router piece of kit, which then needs putting on a normal ethernet network. on this network you have an access point to distribute it by 802.whatever

State of Broadband in Oz

[greystormcloud]

As noted in many other posts the current state of Broadband internet connections in Australia is a joke. I happen to live 4kms (~2miles) from the center of Canberra THE AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL CITY and cannot get ADSL - (due to distance from the exchange).

I could get an ISDN line from our beloved Tel$tra but would pay more for a 64k line than people up the road are paying for 512k unlimited DSL - and i would be locked into a 1 year contract.

Yet another reason to kick Johnny in the arse come the election at the end of this year. Vision? What is that?

Re:Too bad Teledesic didn't get to launch

[dcm1101]

Teledesic didn't work because it was INSANELY EXPENSIVE. I mean, their original plan called for something like 480 satellites in a low Earth orbit. Then they scaled it back to two hundred or so satellites with reduced functionality and coverage. And then, shortly before they withered away, they were saying something about *maybe* a dozen satellites in a higher orbit with even less coverage. I think at that point they looked at the plan and said: "Oh shit, this has been done before and it was called Iridium"

Re:State of Broadband in Oz

[lazybeam]

due to distance from the exchange

Have you tried reapplying today? Telstra just extended the distance allowable for ADSL just the other day. Now the most common copper can be over 4km instead of 3.5km.

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm ?t =177646