Telstra’s new partnership with SpaceX-owned Starlink will soon let mobile customers text from areas of Australia where there is no mobile coverage — although travellers to remote islands and distant territories are out of luck, despite Starlink’s satellites covering them.

The new collaboration, which extends a 2023 agreement that allows Telstra to offer fixed broadband services anywhere in Australia using Starlink’s constellation of low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, will allow mobile users to communicate directly with those satellites.

Implementation of Starlink’s Satellite-to-Mobile (StM) text messaging, which is being progressively rolled out through global telecommunications partnerships and was locked in by Optus in July 2023, will first enable texting from newer devices.

Other capabilities such as the ability to make phone calls and access broadband data services are expected to come online down the track.

While Telstra claims that its existing 4G and 5G mobile networks cover 99.7 per cent of Australia’s populated areas, a company blog post said the new Starlink deal was aimed at providing coverage in other parts of Australia’s “vast” landmass.

“There will always be large areas where mobile and fixed networks do not reach, and this is where satellite technology will play a complementary role to our existing networks,” the company said.

Satellite-to-Mobile could create “a future where outdoor connectivity for basic services … may be possible from some of Australia’s most remote locations,” Telstra said.

The company added a disclaimer noting the absence of coverage in WA’s Australian Radio Quiet Zone “and remote offshore territories and islands of Australia”.

Another nail for NBN’s satellites?

The partnership significantly intensifies the competitive threat to NBN Co’s two Sky Muster satellites, which were launched a decade ago but are struggling to attract customers amidst chronic congestion and the rapid improvement of Starlink and Amazon’s coming rival.

Recent benchmarking by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) found that Starlink runs four times faster than Sky Muster services, with 22 times less latency — a crucial measure of the services’ responsiveness.

Those results offer significant promise for frustrated regional and rural Australians who have struggled to reap the benefits of better broadband, with unreliable and unavailable services causing them constant headaches despite carriers’ claims of near-universal coverage.


The NBN's Sky Muster II satellite was launched in October 2016. Photo: Maxar Technologies / Supplied

The actual reach of Australian mobile services will be measured in an upcoming years-long coverage audit to be conducted with Australia Post, but in the short term Telstra’s Starlink deal offers new hope for those whose travels take them out of mobile coverage areas.

Telstra was contacted for details about the timeline of service availability but did not respond by press time.

Addressing emergency services gaps

Starlink has so far adopted a go-slow approach to StM, with one-way messaging a limited use case that Telstra calls a “just-in-case connectivity layer that allows a person to make contact for help or let someone know they are OK” outside of their carrier’s network area.

Yet StM reflects growing awareness of the need to improve emergency services systems, which trace back to landline days and whose transition to embrace mobile users was shown to be vulnerable when the 2023 Optus outage stranded thousands of emergency callers.

Optus copped a $12 million fine for interruption to emergency services — echoing a separate $3 million fine for a 90-minute Telstra fail — leading authorities to tighten reporting requirements during such outages, and to revive discussions about overhauling Triple Zero.

A recent parliamentary review flagged LEO satellites as a potentially critical part of a changing mix of emergency communications technologies that also includes temporary “disaster roaming” where a carrier’s mobile network becomes unavailable.

“A reliable communications network for regional and remote Australia is the key to unlocking wider benefits for business including improving productivity, social and health benefits,” Minister for Communications Michelle Rowland said at the time.

“Our government wants to explore all options available to us to continue to improve regional and remote communications.”