NBN Co will offer enterprise services on its Sky Muster satellites from early 2019, the network builder has revealed.
The company awarded a ten-year deal to ASX-listed Speedcast to “design, build and manage NBN Co’s enterprise satellite services”.
The base build and managed services arrangement is worth around $107 million, but Speedcast said the total deal could reach as high as $184 million, depending on take-up and demand.
“The provision of wholesale business-grade services over the Sky Muster satellites has been a part of NBN Co’s product roadmap since 2014,” NBN Co said in a statement.
“It will be complementary to NBN Co’s existing retail Sky Muster satellite offering and will not impact residential services.”
Speedcast said it would establish a new office in Melbourne to manage the project.
“The services provided by Speedcast will complement NBN Co’s consumer satellite service and will serve to increase the availability of enterprise-grade cost-effective communications solutions for Australian businesses,” Speedcast said in a statement of its own.
The use of Sky Muster is slowly evolving from residential into a range of other services.
One of the newer uses is to power in-flight wi-fi for Qantas; again NBN Co has said that service has no impact on residential use of the network.
The company has also looked to trials of “transportable Sky Muster terminals” which could open a business opportunity around emergency services.
NBN Co is similarly developing educational services that can be multicast over Sky Muster via a trial in the Northern Territory.
Last year, NBN Co said it wanted to secure up to one-fifth of all its revenues from the business market by the end of the rollout in 2020.
NBN Co today said there was no issue with capacity on its Sky Muster satellites to support extra users.
"The satellites have been designed to provide access to 240,000 active services in regional and remote Australia," it said.
"Currently, there are approximately 84,000 active Sky Muster services and growing at a rate of approximately 1000 activations per month."