Greetings from my holiday. I’m writing this post from a beautiful, remote part of our country. The scenery is stunning, the air is clean, and the digital infrastructure is, to put it mildly, an abomination. I’m talking, of course, about NBN’s Sky Muster satellite service.
The dream of the modern professional is the ability to work from anywhere. A few hours of work in the morning, the rest of the day to explore. It’s a great idea, in theory. The reality, when your only link to the outside world is Sky Muster, is a special kind of hell. The connection at my accommodation offers latency measured not in milliseconds, but in whole seconds. Trying to load a simple webpage is a painful exercise in patience, with speeds that would make a 28.8k modem from 1997 blush. It is, without a shred of hyperbole, unusable rubbish.
I'm giving Sky Muster an honorary position on the Wall Of Shame.
A Postcard from the Digital Dark Ages
So how am I managing to write and upload this post? By abandoning the dedicated, taxpayer-funded broadband infrastructure and tethering to my mobile phone. I have one, very flimsy, bar of Telstra 4G. Just one. And that single, flickering bar is completely eviscerating the performance of the Sky Muster dish bolted to the roof. Let that sink in. A weak, fringe mobile signal is a superhighway compared to the NBN’s purpose-built solution for regional Australia.
Now, in the spirit of technical fairness, I realise what’s likely happened. A previous guest has chewed through the monthly data allowance and now the connection hasn't just slowed down; it’s been throttled into oblivion, shaped to a speed that makes it functionally useless for anything beyond plain text emails (if you're lucky).
But this brings me to my core frustration. What on earth is a restrictive data cap doing on a primary internet service in 2025?
This isn't a mobile hotspot I’m using for emergencies. This is supposed to be the national standard for broadband in areas where fibre can't reach. The very concept of a data cap on a fixed-line equivalent service is archaic. It’s a business model from a bygone era, a relic of a time when bandwidth was a scarce and precious commodity. Today, it serves only to punish users and entrench the digital divide the NBN was supposed to eliminate.
The NBN was lauded as a nation-building project, a great equaliser that would bring Australia into the 21st century. And for many in the cities, it has been transformative. But for regional and rural Australia, Sky Muster feels like a cruel joke. It was an astronomically expensive project that resulted in a service that was outdated the moment it launched.
This isn't just a theoretical problem; I've seen its impact firsthand. A former colleague of mine who lives regionally was stuck on Sky Muster, and her daily struggle was a perfect illustration of the service's failings. For her, video calls—the absolute bedrock of modern remote work—were borderline unusable. The issue wasn't just the high latency, but the crippling jitter (jitter is the variation in latency over time; instead of data packets arriving at a steady, predictable pace, they arrive in erratic clumps). This made her video feed constantly freeze, stutter, and desync, turning every meeting into a frustrating mess. The situation was so dire that if she was working, her family couldn't even stream a show in another room. The moment they switched to Starlink, the change was transformative. Suddenly, multiple HD video streams and seamless remote work weren't a dream, but a daily reality. It was the 2025 internet experience Sky Muster was supposed to deliver, but never could.
The physics of geostationary satellites alone presented a challenge. The sheer distance the signal must travel (approximately 35,786 km up and 35,786 km down) imposes a hard limit on latency. The round-trip time can never be faster than the speed of light allows, giving a theoretical minimum latency of around approx 240ms. In practice, with processing and network overhead, it’s often closer to 600ms or more. That’s before you even consider the laughably low throughput and punitive data caps. I can't take the credit for the maths here - thank you modern AI.
So here I sit, nursing my single bar of 4G, getting my work done. But while this is a temporary frustration for me as a holidaymaker, we need to be clear: this is a daily, crippling reality for the Australians who live and work in these regions. This isn't just about a slow Netflix stream; it's about economic survival and basic access to essential services.
Think of the small businesses that are the lifeblood of regional towns. How can they compete when they're cut off from the cloud-based point-of-sale, inventory, and accounting systems that are standard in the city? How can a farm leverage AgTech innovations that rely on real-time data transfer? How can a tourism operator manage online bookings when their connection is too slow to load a calendar?
And what about the families who call these places home? Children are disadvantaged when they can't access the same online educational resources as their city cousins. The promise of telehealth becomes a hollow one when video consultations are impossible. The simple act of staying connected with family and the wider world becomes a daily battle.
Sky Muster isn't just an inconvenience; it's a fundamental barrier to progress, innovation, and equality. It's a digital anchor holding back entire communities. The NBN was meant to close the digital divide, but for a significant portion of Australia, this expensive, outdated system has only carved it deeper.
Update: from the middle of the night
The standard behavior for Sky Muster plans is to segment peak and off-peak periods and cap each of these time slots independently. Just to be thorough, I managed to run a speed test during the off-peak period (where it turns out the service I'm using wasn't throttled), representing Sky Muster in its 'best-case scenario' before data caps are hit. Sky Muster's standard off-peak time is 1am till 7am (talk about restrictive): so at just after 1am I ran a speed test. The results were as predicted: a paltry 25 Mbps download and an upload speed struggling to reach 6 Mbps.
Let’s put this into stark perspective: The absolute best download speed this service can offer is slower than the upload speed of many common metropolitan NBN plans. That sub-6 Mbps upload makes modern business essentials like cloud backups, sending large project files, or maintaining a stable, high-quality video call incredibly challenging. While a city-based business effortlessly syncs huge files to the cloud, its regional counterpart is left watching a progress bar crawl. This isn't just a performance gap; it's a chasm. It confirms that even when Sky Muster is working exactly as intended, it is still a fundamentally second-rate service that actively disadvantages the businesses and communities forced to rely on it, further entrenching the digital divide.
What is a regional business to do?
If you aren't serviced by a fixed-line Internet connection, there are still a number of options your regional business can consider:
- Sky Muster - as we have discussed here.
- Sky Muster Plus - an improvement on the original Sky Muster but with some of its own limitations.
- NBN Business Satellite Service ("BSS") - Also based on Sky Muster technology, however NBN is no longer offering the product and all existing customer plans will cease on the 31st Dec 2025.
- Starlink - Part of Elon Musk's SpaceX, utilising Low Earth Orbit ("LEO") satellite technology.
- Cellular connectivity - leveraging 4G or 5G mobile networks.
- Community or Wireless ISP ("WISP") - There are a number of community efforts working hard to bridge this digital divide.
Of course choosing the right service or combination of services is critical for your business. If you need assistance making the right choice AFSecure is always here to help.