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?"

My wallet just shriveled.

[irokitt]

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

This would be nice in the great plains

[Quebst]

I have heard of this also happening in parts of South America and, I think, Africa. But this leads to another question.

Is this sort of access going to be used in the US? I live in a rural area, and I cannot live on a farm and have DSL or cable. The only access I could use outside of town is DirectTV's access, which is very expensive. I even live in a populated area compared to Alaska, Wyoming, or Montana for example. Anyone know of a similar idea being done in the states? I for one would move and sign up.

As far as this being used in South America, I find it ironic they have wi-fi access but lack much more important technologies, such as better roads or medicine. Of course, the information and education provided by such access may lead to better conditions. This is a huge experiment in putting the cart before the horse.

Too bad Teledesic didn't get to launch

[Anonymous Coward]

If Teledesic had been able to get to launch, Bill Gates, Craig McCaw, and some Saudi dude would be able to provide broadband to the Earth, and thus owned a global backbone. Low-Earth Orbiting Satellites would have been nice except for completely confusing astronomers. Put Al Gore in there somewhere to make it official. Anyone actually know why Teledesic didn't get off the ground?

Does Australia have a Universal Access Fund?

[JohnA]

Here in the states, every telecom subscriber is required to pay into the Universal Access Fund, which provided subsidies for those living outside of an economically viable service area to receive POTS.

This seems like a perfect application of said UAF funds...,

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[obeythefist]

Hello, welcome to the internet.

The reason US traffic (and most internet) costs are so high for Australian users, besides Telstra of course, is that US companies expect Australia to bear the cost of both incoming and outgoing traffic to the USA. This is standard US policy.

Thanks for coming along, we hope you enjoy your stay here. Unless you aren't american.

Re:Broadband in Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a broadband cable rollout some years back, and a lot of residents complained that the extra overhead cable would wreck their view and lower their houses values due to the nasty look of an extra cable floating above them.

The Australian Federal Goverment decided not to step in to force Telstra to share it's cable with Optus. So Optus ran their own cable right next to the Telstra cable. Our street has two overhead cables.

And now roughly 80% of Australians have coverage twice, whilst the remaing 20% are stuck with satellite coverage.

The sparsly populated areas are just too expensive to cable. This is why Wireless is so attractive for regional areas.

Australia is useless when it comes to Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

I moved to Australia 2 months ago, and New South Wales is pretty much useless when it comes to internet, DSL is expensive as hell, and you probably end up with a 200MB download limit per month. If you are really lucky, pay lots of $$$ and signs up for 12 months, then you might get 1 GB per month.. thats about what Im used to downlading i one night on my ADSL line back home..

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[Some Guy in Canada]

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.

That's a similar problem with getting commercial providers to bring internet out to the many rural areas of my province (Alberta, Canada). But the government is currently installing a massive fibre network to all schools and gov't offices (even the tiny hicktowns), and when it's done commercial ISPs will be able to hook in. Already there are companies preparing to use this to offer dsl/cable in small towns.

Re:Does Australia have a Universal Access Fund?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite - we have a government-owned (well, 51% government owned, and only till the damn fools convice us to let them sell the rest of it too) telecom. The idea is that there are regulations in force making sure telstra (aforementioned telecom) maintains a certain degree of service to remote areas of australia, but in practise (and especially since the sale of 49% of telstra to the public), service to remote rural areas is average at best.

Before I get tarred and brushed as one of those 'dirty socialists' by some tobacco chewin' sister rootin' george dubya voter, I should mention that I have no problems with economic competition or capitalism for that matter - but I do believe that government-run organizations - with their loyalties to the government and people in general, as opposed to their shareholders - should supply basic utilities - water, electricity, gas and telecommunications. The reasoning behind this is obvious when you look at how telstra is beginning to operate - anyone who thinks that our (hopefully not) soon to be ex-government owned telecom will bother doing squat to expand its services outside of metropolitan areas after the sale of the remaining gov't owned 51% of stock is a damn fool.

Sorry about the political rant, but I've been seeing more and more of them on slashdot lately, and, as they say, evil begats more evil :(

-d

Re:From someone who actually supports these things

[fake_name]

.35c/MB seems to be Telstra's default cost for data. This figure includes both transport of the data, as well as providing the data; some satellite network providers will give much cheaper transfer rates but you need to somehow supply the data to their uplink for them, meaning you need to pay extra for an internet link. (assuming you want the remote sites to have internet access)

All Over Northern Canada

[hibachi]

The company I work for, SSI Micro, [ssimicro.com] has provided full-mesh frame relay and Internet services over satellite throughout northern Canada, well into the high arctic, since early 2000. We continue to expand the number of communities we service across the north all the time. The Outback almost sounds like a walk in the park by comparison - assuming you don't mind snakes. We also recently deployed a six site satellite network in Zambia to provide Internet services to an international development organisation there. Certainly each of these remote regions provide their own set of challenges.

In addition to dial-up, we have always used wireless technologies as a last mile solution. We used 802.11 for many years in those applications, and continue to do so. Currently we are also working with Inukshuk [inukshuk.ca] to roll out MCS wireless services, as mentioned in an earlier Slashdot story, [slashdot.org] and it is simply an amazing technology. The broadband picture keeps getting better and better up here all the time.

Satellite is definitely here to stay. It is going to be a long time before every nook and cranny of this world is wired, and frankly, I hope it never is.

Re:My wallet just shriveled.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, in other words, we have a nice duopoly (Optus and Telstra, with Telstra doing most of the running these days, it would appear), where the incentive is to keep prices nice and high to have a nice high revenue stream. The barrier to entry is high -- have you tried running an undersea cable across the Pacific lately? -- so the risk of competition undercutting the prices is fairly low.

As you can see [whirlpool.net.au], Telstra recently dropped its retail pricing rates below its wholesale pricing levels. This caused a major ruckus in the telecommunications industry, and a competition notice from the ACCC. As far as I can tell, Telstra does the bare minimum it can to keep the ACCC off its back, whilst slugging Australian users as much as it can get away with.

Case in point: one big problem with Bigpond (aka Bigpong in some circles), and the reason I would never take up an account with them, is that you are charged for both download AND upload traffic. This has resulted in more than a few stories of thousand dollar plus (including at least one in the multiples of thousand dollars) bills in a month from P2P traffic (amongst other things).

Telstra. "This is your monopoly calling." *spit*

Our local wireless project went tits up

[Linker3000]

A company proposed an 802.11a wireless broadband network sharing a 2Mb leased line for our '6 village' area on the South Coast of the UK. We're not a million miles from civilisation (nearest big town is about 6 miles), but we're 'rural' and so our phone exchanges were not likely to be broadband enabled for a short while.

Monthly charges were about the same as POTS-based broadband, plus the client kit costs, but I felt that since there were quite a few small businesses in the area POTS broadband would happen eventually and so I stuck to my single channel ISDN.

At a kick-off meeting for the network, I raised concerns about the likelihood of POTS-based broadband coming to the area and diluting the wireless user base (it needed to maintain a certain number of subscribers to pay for the kit maintenance costs, power and also keep up the rental on the leased line), but was dismissed by those excited (IMHO) by the technology aspects of the system and perhaps the thrill of having a funny-shaped antenna on their roof!

Guess what, the company providing the infrastructure went bust before the roll-out was complete. I understand some of the kit may have been taken by creditors and so the system's now not intact and no buyer for the network installation could be found because many of those approached (about 10) realised that there was a local phone exchange likely to be broadband enabled 'sometime'. The final (post-going-bust) nail in the coffin was that broadband came to the area in December 2003 (2 months after the wireless provider went bust) via the local phone exchange.

The Australian solution looks like the right thing for the right demographics, the solution proposed in our area seemed to be pandering to the impatient and the technophiles, and not well thought out business-wise.

In the UK

[include($dysmas)]

im doing a similar project for a bunch of villages in the midlands, using only open source software on every bit of kit under my control and its worked out perfectly and onehelluvalot cheaper than certain other alternatives....

Ive got a job in the south of france soon to provide satellite/wireless access to 15 villages which should provide quite a challenge, 15 downpoints and ~400 clients from each downpoint ;)

Wi-Fi extension to some kilometers

[Anonymous Coward]

The other day, there was a report on a german tv channel about a project in a rural area in {holland, scandinavia?}. Some people took some standard parts from the local DIY-store as antennas and extended the range to some kilometers. They have alreay built a working network in their area using this technology. May be someone has seen the same report and remembers where it was located?

Free Internet for those living under suppresion

[Dovregubbens Hall]

It is something like this I have suggested [slashdot.org] that "we" build in areas where people are living under suppression, where the Internet is under strong control and the government can censor everything.

A free and uncontrolled Internet could be very valuable under those conditions, and if the routers where hard to find, it could be a very powerful democratizing force.

Aramiska

[manon]

The Dutch company Aramiska [aramiska.com] does the same. They were in Linux User [aramiska.com].

Why Not Wireless Mesh?

[CaptainTux]

We're doing something similar [blogspot.com] for our small town [miamiok.org] and a few other small towns here in Oklahoma but we're going the wireless mesh route. It's cheaper, easier to maintain, and isn't as confusing for the average user. It also allows for some pretty cool profit sharing opportunities for the subscribers. Even as remote as Austrailia can be, I have to wonder why they didn't use this route. IMHO, satellite seems like overkill for this. Anyone know why mesh wouldn't have worked there?