IT BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES ON NORFOLK ISLAND GET A BOOST

With the announcement by NBN Co. that they would purchase two satellites to service remote and regional Australia, Norfolk Island is set to go in the e-commerce world. The following is an edited version of a story on the Delimiter website;
NBN Co’s brand new satellites will be able to deliver something like 90GHz of dedicated capacity to Australia.
Much of the commercial satellite capacity in Australia is targeted over metropolitan areas, where the greatest return will be made for commercial operators, due to a heavier concentration of targets. In comparison, NBN Co will explicitly target users in remote areas, where normal satellite operators would find it hard to operate a commercially successful service.
The impact this rollout will have on the nation’s rural broadband problem is dramatic. For starters, speeds will be boosted immediately, from the currently available 6MBps (or even less in many areas) to 12Mbps. Coverage will also be boosted — from something like 48,000 people to several hundred thousand, including Australia’s external territories such as Norfolk Island, Christmas Island, Macquarie Island and the Cocos Islands. And the monthly quota problem will also be resolved, due to the excess capacity available through the infrastructure.
But why launch two satellites? Couldn’t one do? No, NBN Co is launching two satellites for redundancy, and to spread the load.
Building satellite broadband infrastructure isn’t like building terrestrial broadband infrastructure. If something goes wrong in space, NBN Co won’t be able to visit its satellite installations to fix the problem. “Anyone designing any telecommunications networks, must design in diversity into the solution,” In the case of one satellite partially or totally failing, the several hundred Australians being served by the infrastructure won’t lose signal.
Instead NBN Co will be able to migrate all the users off one satellite and onto the other. Under normal circumstances both will be used, with each taking some of the load of Australia’s telecommunications needs.
It is clear that NBN Co has just completed an exhaustive process of several years’ effort investigating Australia’s current satellite capacity and how NBN Co should best meet its government policy demands. NBN Co has taken two years to go through this every which way, [seeing] what’s available, what’s becoming available, where the bandwidth is laid down. Is it C-band, is it I-band, is it KA-band.”
While NBN Co has been criticised for its procurement process for the satellite process NBN Co's Project Director, Matt Dawson noted that the two process had been “very competitive”. “We know we’ve got very good prices for these sort of satellites,” he said. “We really do try to do the best that we possibly can. We have to be fiscally responsible, with taxpayers’ dollars,” he adds.