Authorities have urged the more than 84,000 customers of NBN Co’s Sky Muster satellite broadband service to consider their options after benchmarking showed that low earth orbit (LEO) satellite provider Starlink offers four times the speed with a fraction of the latency.

Services from Starlink – the Elon Musk-backed service whose more than 7,400 satellites orbit just a few hundred kilometres above Earth’s surface – delivered peak download speeds of around 470Mbps, and uploads of around 74Mbps.

By contrast, services from NBN Co’s two Sky Muster satellites maxed out at around 111Mbps for downloads and 22Mbps for uploads, the ACCC reported after releasing its latest Measuring Broadband Australia report, which includes satellite services for the first time ever.

Starlink’s proximity to its users means data transmissions don’t have to travel as far, allowing faster broadband speeds and the use of lower-powered devices such as smartphones – with Optus already onboard to roam onto Starlink and Telstra utilising it for fixed services.

That proximity also means that Starlink delivered significantly shorter latency – the delay between when data is sent to a server and a reply received, which can affect the stability and responsiveness of gaming, multimedia, and other services – of 29.8 milliseconds (ms).

By contrast, latency over Sky Muster services – whose satellites are fixed in orbit some 35,786km above Earth – averaged 664.9ms, making the NBN Co broadband services 22 times less responsive than Starlink.

The findings – which are based on data collected in September – are significant for rural and regional Australians, many of whom continue to struggle with unreliable broadband services and many others who simply don’t have access to faster fixed broadband at all.

“Many consumers in rural and remote areas rely on alternatives such as satellite services to connect to the internet,” ACCC Commissioner Anna Brakey said in releasing the new report.

“When deciding which plan or provider is best,” she advised, “we encourage consumers to consider both the performance data as well as the price of the service and their household’s broadband usage needs.”


More than 200,000 Australians have reportedly used Starlink internet services. Photo: Shutterstock

A wake-up call for NBN Co

The results are a validation of Starlink’s LEO investment, which has been flagged as a potential threat to Sky Muster-based services ever since Starlink debuted here in 2021 amidst complaints from the likes of Foxtel.

NBN Co has tried a range of tactics to maximise the speed of Sky Muster, shifting around 120,000 users onto terrestrial fixed wireless broadband; trialling an unlimited 100Mbps service; and even asking users to download rather than stream videos to reduce congestion.

Yet with Starlink now widely available across Australia, the figures confirm that the broadband wholesale operator’s 84,381 remaining satellite customers – just a quarter of the number of premises said to be ready to connect to satellite – now have a viable alternative.

More than 200,000 Australian customers have reportedly already adopted Starlink services, including emergency responders and government agencies which have spent over $50 million on Starlink in three years.

That makes Australians particularly keen adopters of the services: by comparison, newly released figures from UK telecommunications regulator OFCOM showed just 87,000 Starlink services live in the UK this year.

Starlink is likely to continue winning in Australia – despite concerns about an overreliance on the whim of mercurial CEO Musk to keep Starlink available at all times – although Sky Muster could enjoy a reprieve if demand stagnates when the service reaches saturation.

Australia’s broadband is “approaching a plateau,” telecommunications analyst Paul Budde recently wrote, “as most users settle into speeds of 50-100Mbps, curtailing growth in demand.”

Data for the Measuring Broadband Australia program are compiled by UK-based firm SamKnows, which offers volunteers in Australia and other countries a device called a Whitebox that regularly checks the speed of their internet service performance.

The program also collects data about fixed services, with NBN Co’s 100Mbps service plans maxing out at 88.1Mbps over fibre to the node (FttN), 102.8Mbps over hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC), and 103.6Mbps over fibre to the premises (FttP).

Faster NBN Co plans were found to be delivering robust speeds, with customers on 250Mbps plans reporting peaks of 260.8Mbps and those on NBN Co’s gigabit-class services delivering 840.1Mbps over HFC connections and 864.5Mbps over FttP.