Starlink for business in Australia with Radek Tkaczyk from NetVault

[Music] hello and welcome to Red's Business and Technology podcast I'm your host Jackson Barnes I'm your co-host Brad Ferris and today we're sitting down with the technical director of netvault radic to karchik who specializes in everything business Communications and is a partner of red right thanks for coming in today really looking forward to the chat it should be quite exciting mate did you want to start with your background before we get into netvault and all the crazy Innovation they're doing in the communication sector definitely thanks guys thanks for having me on here it's great to sort of be here and see uh See the great setup you guys have got here but um yeah so netvault is the the company where I'm from so we focus on three coil products product pillars for our Channel Partners um internet services telephony services and cloud services so from our background perspective we started in the industry about 14 years ago where we focus purely on Virtual machines and we were at the time the company name was called VM Vault and a VM Vault being virtual machine Vault a secure place to store your virtual machines so this was really before the cloud was even sort of a term here in in the country and we were probably one of the first you know infrastructure as a service Cloud vendors here and we started out with a single data center here in Brisbane let's roll back on that before you um before you started nevault or VM Vault actually what did you do before that and then and then segue into why you started VM build yeah sure so my background is uh pureit so ever since uni I did a degree in it after graduating from there my first job was at an MSP building PCS building servers back in the the good old say you know 2000 sort of sort of era that then grew into more of the networking side of things networking Technologies and uh you know for the first you know 15 years of my career I was working as you know for msps specifically as a network engineer so that was the first the first part of my career as you know 10 years working for for various I.T companies and now the last 14 years has been with uh with VM volts now netvault after our Rebrand okay so what what did you start being bold so back in the very early days um I saw that there was a a need for you know hosted infrastructure at the time you know this is before people were looking at the cloud and you know being able to have their workloads and servers you know insecure data centers where they didn't have to worry about Power Cooling security you know all the costs associated with the with running it infrastructure on premises I mean it could be taken away by at least you know either virtualizing their workloads or or moving those servers to a to a Data Center and then linking that back through using high-speed fiber high speed connectivity back through uh back through that so that was our sort of first Forte into into technology and then you know after we started doing these virtual machines in the in the data center as people were starting to say well hey you know we've got our infrastructure workloads with you guys fantastic can we get a you know high speed a direct high-speed fiber link from our office to your data center to be able to access these workloads faster sure of course we can do that from there that sort of uh led to being able to uh to offer internet access across those high-speed fiberlinks sure of course we can do that around that time the NBN started coming out in the country and we were focusing on you know providing internet services via the NBN for people and associated with that was the disconnection of voice services so we got sort of lumped into doing voice Services as well and you know the the whole Mantra of just doing virtual machines you know wasn't at uh we still did that but it wasn't you know the only thing that we did we started to get people saying Hey to VM Vault what is that voicemail Vault no the idea was that we uh we're doing virtual machines and because we were doing so many other things than just virtual machines that then hence why we did a big Rebrand from VM vaults to netvault to Encompass you know all things networks so you Diversified um your service offering and then when did you change your name to the netball we read we we knew we had to Rebrand and around about 2018 2017 2018 when we had so many other services than just virtual machines but 2019 is when we sort of bit the bullet and said right about time we did this and uh and did the full Rebrand to netvault and what it is now okay and then today you um still still do the virtual machine work but you focus mostly like most of your turnovers on uh Communications is that right well see there's three cool product pillars that we focus on Internet services telephony services and cloud services so the virtual machine and Cloud infrastructure is very much at our core and and at our heart is you know that's where we started business I suppose but then branching out into the internet side and the telephony side really gave us three distinct product pillars that we work on and those um those product pillars really come back to our 10 data centers that we have around the country where we aggregate our services and provide our own fiber around storage our own sort of uh infrastructure sets specifically for other channel partners and msps like red yeah that makes it makes a lot of sense and I think Red Data a similar story starting on the digital advisory side and pivoting to as the technology industry evolves to what people need the most right so I did want to pick your brain and go into the topic of the evolution of the communication industry because you're you've always seen it all evolving over the last 14 almost 15 years now what did the communications industry look like when you started net Vault 14 years ago well back in the uh back in the early days I suppose the the majority of services in Australia are from a Communications perspective were delivered over copper right so we did a lot of work with ethernet over copper Services being able to deliver shdsl EOC type links this is back when you know fiber was just way too expensive to be able to do anything um a lot of the work that we were doing was purely around copper-based Services then as time has progressed as time has gone on we've really gone down the the fiber optic path I mean NBN really sort of transformed a lot of that and really introduced a lot of competition within the the raw fiber providers to bring down the cost to to make it more affordable make it more accessible for for your smaller businesses to be able to access high speed reliable uh internet connectivity yeah that's definitely happened and it's probably probably a good thing uh like a mortgage broking industry into banking I like to drive down in interest rates that kind of thing I think the communication issue is something similar because even the small businesses now with 20 30 40 employees can have a gigabit fiber connection which is um pretty unreal so that's I guess the where it was before and how it's evolved what's next um as far as you can see radic being in the front and center every day speaking about Communications to businesses and and you've gotten in some some strategic Partners as well back into the industry what do you think is going to be next for the communications industry well fiber seems to be the you know flavor that everyone wants to get to it's the gold standard of getting a fiber internet service into you know everywhere and while that's a great idea um it doesn't work in practice with a with a country as big as Australia where you've got such vast distances between even capital cities and and even some of the remote Regional towns mbnco have done a great job in getting fiber to those those places um whether or not the coalition government sort of uh did the right thing or the wrong thing by this whole multi-technology mix that uh that they forced NBN to do well let's not talk politics but one thing that the NBN has done is definitely forced competition um with the likes of your telstra's your Optus vocuses of the world to make a Fiber Optic internet access more more accessible that then leads to you know 4G 5G you know all these other technologies that are coming down the field with low earth orbit satellite technology really being the uh the the hot ticket item at the moment so that's what you think the industry is going definitely definitely I suppose yeah um I know uh Brands will be very excited to hear about the next topic we'll go into project Halo do you have any questions before we uh no no I know what's coming I've been waiting for this for a long time I'm very excited we've got some props we've got some slides so sorry for those who are Audio Only You definitely want to look at this on this on video because you're about to have your mind blown yeah all right right so I think Brad's hopped you up a bit um product Halo what what is it and then uh and let's go well the best way of talking about project Halo is to start off at one of these slides that I've got here and talking about something a bit more exciting than that Vault let's talk about something that we're is true to Brad's in my heart you know talk about starlink so yeah yeah for those that uh that don't know what starlink is I'm going to put this back right to the very start now I always start this off by showing this gentleman I mean you must you must be living under a rock these days to not know who that is right so the CEO and founder one of the co-founders I believe of Tesla now everyone knows about Tesla and what they're doing with the electric vehicle market and how that's changing the automotive industry ironically everyone around this table has one of those Vehicles indeed I've got a Tesla Model 3 my wife has got a Tesla Model X um Brad you've got a model two model threes yeah Jackson's got a model three my wife's got one I've got one I think we're all converted on the whole electric vehicles such a fanboy episode but one of the companies that Elon Musk is involved with that's um you know mainstream people might not be aware of is a company called SpaceX I always like to set the scene when I when I when I give this sort of a presentation like this to show people what SpaceX are doing so I'm going to play this and have a look at this lwo on weathernet uhts is ready for launch the ignition liftoff Falcon 9 is clear the tower [Music] ten nine eight side booster ignition six five four three two one [Music] foreign of what SpaceX are actually doing they're launching satellites up into space and Landing those Rockets back on the ground so what you're looking at here is not CGI footage but that's actually raw footage of them Landing a one of their SpaceX Falcon 9 Rockets back on the ground the important part of that is that each one of these rocket boosters is 65 million dollars U.S so by being able to land those Rockets back on the ground they're able to refuel them give them a Polish send them back up with the next payload it's gotten to the point where SpaceX can do satellite launches 90 percent cheaper than anyone else yeah so bold underscore underline that is such a game changer and SpaceX were the first company to ever be able to do that correct that's right the first like 20 or 30 attempts they did at Landing those rocket boosters was a failure as you'd expect but by the time they were able to you know perfect that the last 100 or so launches all Flawless for landing those Rockets back on the ground fantastic first company in the world to do it everyone said that Elon Musk and SpaceX were nuts trying to do it can't be done can't be done and look where we are you know a short four or five years later oh that's impressive and then you're going to segue that back into Communications I guess there's a couple there are we talking Rockets no because that leads into the next part on on this little presentation about project Halo and what project Halo is all about now the best way about explaining project Halo is to show you this little video and have a listen to this low latency internet powered by starlink free for you and your school find out how in this video [Music] for those that aren't aware starlink is the brainchild of Elon Musk and SpaceX whereby stylink are aiming to cover the entire world in high-speed low latency internet access now when I'm referring to speeds I'm talking about speeds of between 200 and 300 megabits per second and latency or ping of around 20 to 40 milliseconds this will be available anywhere in the world which will be a real Boom for those Regional rural parts of the globe this is where project Halo comes in Project Halo is a 100 000 internet package Grant that's been put together by netvault SpaceX and Cisco to give a Regional School in Australia the opportunity to experience internet speeds of the 21st century as part of this grant 30 students or teachers will receive a styling terminal for use in their home AKA Edition mcflatface these terminals are included as part of the grant free for 12 months also included in the grant is one of these units for the school itself along with netvault's seamless 4G LTE failover technology which is powered by Cisco routers to deliver reliability and security for the school also included are 10 of these Cisco video phones that the school can use throughout the buildings for video conferencing facilities in the school right so the school uh doesn't pay anything in and gets that or how does that work correct so the idea was that the grant was enough for uh providing the school and 30 students with starlink technology Cisco technology at netvault technology to you know really make a big difference for regional and rural parts of uh of Australia a lot of schools already do have Fiber Optic internet access but there are some pockets of of Australia where it's just not feasible to run fiber optic too they can't get decent uh NBN services and the only option they've got is traditional geostationary satellite services yeah no I definitely experienced that firsthand always because um born in I'm not born I've lived in Rockhampton for 25 years and I was traveling around to like division state school and banana state school and that's kind of got 30 kids in the whole school and I think um division had eight at one point in the fiber out there absolutely no chance yep yep and the what we always saw about 230 odd schools applied for the grant but we could only accept One winner and we really wanted to Showcase you know what starlink could do um in in Australia and for the lack of better terms it was designed to launch starlink Services here in Australia and and showcase what it can do for for regional and Rural communities now the story for this goes a little bit further and it really comes into its own when I start talking about the winner of Project Halo now the winner of Project Halo was vistara primary school now these guys are a very small School located in Lismore now for those that were watching what happened in the Lismore and Northern New South Wales area earlier this year this is where this sort of really resonates and I'll explain why these are photos of vistara primary school a very small school only about 20 or 30 students uh four classrooms five teachers you know a very small Independent School but we all know what happened in Lismore and north and New South Wales earlier this year so this is what the area looks like today or what it did back in back in March when we were doing all this all right so the kicker on this is that we were due to deploy their project Halo prize the week of the New South Wales floods wow you could not make this sort of stuff up right so because of project Halo and and the work that we had been doing and installing styling Services getting them getting them installed in the very early days when starlink first became available in the country we were in a bit of a unique position where you know we had starlink dishes in stock ready to go for project Halo for vistara primary school as well as other places that we were already doing starlink installations and installing sort of work for so with what happened in the New South Wales floods people were desperate for communications because the damage to the local infrastructure there was so bad that the mobile phone towers weren't just offline they were washed away the the fiber networks that connected the uh the mobile phone towers and the communications infrastructure they were all Downstream so getting those Services up and running was a mammoth effort we were talking about people not being able to get rescued off their roofs of their houses because they couldn't dial triple zero on their mobile phone and sitting up there for days on end trying to get to trying to get rescued off their roofs we were talking to the likes of mbn Co and the New South Wales Telco Authority the state Emergency Services all screaming out at us saying hey you know we can't get hold of anyone at SpaceX you know they're still two weeks away with getting anything into the country for for for styling dishes can can we get dishes from you guys and the story here gets a little bit a little bit more interesting because we couldn't just you know agree and just give them the dishes all you know give them the dishes and repurchase what needed for for project Halo the problem with styling Services is that starlink is geolocked to a 22 kilometer radius cell so if we have a look at some of the some of the starlink cells of what uh how styling deploy their network if you've got a starlink service that's sort of in these lower cells down down the bottom part here you can't just pick up that dish and move it to another area because of that geo-locking right starlink protect their Network so they don't get too many users in a particular cell and that makes sense right because otherwise if you get too many users in a Cell too much congestion too slow it just turns into another NBN why sort of bother so we're talking at that period in time right because you've got that functionality now but you do you're good I'll I'll explain how that works so that was in the early days um where that where that couldn't work now when we look at the cells for you know where project Taylor was to be deployed that was to be deployed in those lower cells on the screen there because it's probably just sorry to cut in but it's really so people know I mean starlight's only really been available to the general public in Australia just after to post this event right so you were this was kind of the First Fleet of dishes give or take to hit the country right yeah that's right so given that we was due to deploy those dishes in that cell there you know where where the dishes were really needed was more so in these upper cells where that Devastation was where people couldn't dial triple zero that's where it really needed to sort of uh uh sort of um get Communications more so at that point there I was talking to SpaceX saying oh hey can we can we uh you know we've got these dishes here already can we redeploy them to to the upper cells um where where we really needed that connectivity and because starlink was so popular and uh those areas were already at capacity for dishes that were due to come in now we couldn't deploy them due to capacity constraints so it's like okay well guys you know SpaceX can you give us more capacity just just 10 more dishes just give us enough capacity just for 10 more dishes in these areas and they said no no they can't do that they can't do that which is a bit strange but then I saw what they were doing with roaming of services in the Ukraine it's like well you know why don't we enable roaming on these dishes can can you enable roaming on them surely we can do that and they're like well how do you even know about roaming it's not available in the country yet um and it was that was all at the time of the Ukraine war starting there so this was all sort of all happening you know all within a couple of days of each other anyway um that my contacts at SpaceX was saying no no no it can't be done can't be done we can't do anything about that I'm like there must be another way so out of desperation I did a tweet to Elon Musk I did a tweet to Elon saying we're trying to get styling to communities that have been cut off by wild weather floods and landslides in Australia Byron Bay is one we'd really appreciate more cell capacity for disaster zones now two hours later Mick Fanning he's the world's number one Surfer that lives in Byron Bay did his own separate tweet completely separate to what I was trying to do to Elon saying we need help with the flood disaster in New South Wales Australia that people have no means of communication and really need your help can you help us with starlink now it was it was as it was as it was as it was from Mick Fanning's tweet if I can get my words correctly it was from mcfanning's tweet because he's got that magic blue circle uh the Blue Tick next to his name much cheaper now yeah anyway it was because of that that Mick caught either elon's attention or someone higher up at SpaceX than I was dealing with and they reached back out to us and said okay we'll enable roaming for you on 10 dishes 10 dishes only but if and only if you donate those dishes to uh to to to the people and those causes and we said all right well fine at least it means we get connectivity to the evacuation centers to the SES for those places where you know people are sitting there uh with their house destroyed at least they can communicate to their their family and friends saying hey the house is gone but we're alive right and that's something that we thought was you know well and truly worthwhile and and uh and something that does good in the community so we said all right we'll donate the dishes we'll get them down there and and get the ball rolling but the next problem that we had is logistics how on Earth do we get 10 dishes down to a place that has been cut off by floods and and wild weather because TNT star track FedEx DHL all those sort of guys refuse to go down there not touching it yeah but then they couldn't right there was nothing they could do about it so Mick Fanning organized some local logistical support for us by sending a truck up to uh to our office in Brisbane collecting those 10 dishes and and sending them down there so at this point here hallelujah now we're cooking with gas so now we could actually get these dishes deployed get them set up for people and we know we even had these rapid deployment kits that we sort of developed uh before this that we could utilize to uh to get starlink to uh to to these areas that were really decimated by the areas now there was one place that sort of uh stood out that we were able to help with this sort of technology and that's the Westpac rescue helicopter service this is their operations center in Lismore that got flooded out with a meter and a half of water due to the the flooding that was happening in Lismore and there's two rescue choppers that they fly from this particular facility and with the operations center completely offline they had to relocate temporarily to the state Emergency Services offices at Ballina airport where they could fly those Choppers from now when they relocated to Ballina airport Telstra could only give them a one megabit per second 4G connection nowhere near enough bandwidth for them to operate properly being able to you know communicate with the rest of their team organize Logistics Staffing everything like that we came in there with one of our rapid deployment kits you know based on the starlink services and next thing you know we're able to get them online and the Choppers back in the sky with you know 200 megabits per second of bandwidth later you know they can be back in the air flying out there rescuing people off cars off houses and doing what they need to do it actually made the leading story um on Channel 9 News Nationwide so have a listen to this because this actually tells the story really well good evening Gold Coast surfing Legend mcfanning put the call out for some more heavyweights to join in the flood recovery tonight vital services are being restored to flood ravaged communities after billionaire Elon Musk answered the call no reception no communication and no power for almost two weeks can you guys help him he just needs a power pack or something Gold Coast surfing Legend Mick Fanning leading the charge in the flood recovery effort urging other big names to step up Tech billionaire Elon Musk answering the call delivering 10 Starling kids to flood ravaged areas providing internet and phone reception to those left cut off still unable to use fpos or make phone calls this is where satellite Technologies really come into their own especially when we start talking about Deployable technology where it can be literally put onto a truck onto a helicopter and deployed the same technology used in Ukraine amid its own humanitarian crisis back here on The Coasters Waters recede questions arising about the widespread Devastation and if areas can be flood proof now there's another good video here that that also covers the the work that we did there news two days ago surf star Mick Fanning called on Tesla founder Elon Musk to use his starlink satellite Network to provide internet coverage and flood ravaged New South Wales today a call answered by Brisbane company netvault this relatively new bleeding edge technology from Elon Musk effectively a ten thousand dollar donation that we're giving to the flood victims of Northern New South Wales all right so with with the roaming that we had enabled in the area meant that we could get connectivity to the places that were in need and really showcase what styling can do in a in a disaster type scenario like this with rapid deployment kits like what's on screen there and you know this is you know led to us doing more and more work around styling services and installation of styling Services uh We've even got a product called seamless 4G failover that we can integrate to starlink to be able to give businesses that higher level of redundancy and reliability for starlink to avoid dropouts and uh and anything like that that may be affecting the primary styling service so probably um a little bit of segue and a little bit of action so we we actually have a dish on the desk here and uh I love this because it's literally internet anywhere in the world in a back in on a on a backpack internet in a box yeah so this is sort of a bit different to the rapid deployment kits that we do but a starlink case a starlink travel case where you've got your dish ready to go and all the associated cables and equipment so that you can you know put this in your back of the Caravan you know back of your car back of your Ute and take Internet sort of sort of Anywhere With You great way of of making styling sort of portable and mobile I suppose at the end of the day yeah like it's it's not that big it's not that heavy it's not that expensive really um and you know I've seen well radic actually we haven't even talked about that but radic is the founder of the starlink Australia uses Facebook group that has about 20 000 users in it where you can get all the tidbits but probably the Highlight for me is going in there and just seeing where people do speed tests who can find the most remote place and do a speed test and get the spot faster speed so you know middle of the nullarbor you know you can't get fuel can't get anything but you can get fast internet now so yeah that's really cool and there's some really good practical uses I mean first thanks for sharing radic that's that's really cool story how um you'll be able to work with Mick Fanning and and um Elon to deliver uh services in a time of really need for people um flood victims that kind of thing so I appreciate that but no it is really good there's a business use as well for um like construction companies out there these days who have got these remote sites who just battle with you know hopeless 4G there's heaps of businesses that are out in areas where like traditional NBN and fiber Services just don't cut it so um that's very exciting so I guess a way to that what um I guess from this and like the pro Taylor everything that happened you've got some fairly unique offerings um like net Vault has some unique offerings do you want to touch on that now yeah sure so one of the key offerings that we've got is around a product that we call you know star the seamless failover for starlink being able to deliver a styling Service as a primary a 4G LTE failover or you know geosat failover another access technology is a failover component where we can fail over from the primary starlink link uh to a 4G LTE link for example in under one second wow and because that failover is so fast and we maintain the same public static IP address it means that you know something like a a phone call a zoom call all you know anything that the user might be using online is unaffected by a primary styling outage and there have been outages in the past even on the 1st of December this year there was a 20-minute Global outage for starlink and those of our clients who had our seamless failover product for starlink which has automatically failed over to their secondary connections and didn't even know that that had happened so some of the government departments that we've installed styling services for now we contacted them and said hey did you see the starlink outage earlier what do you mean no everything worked of course it worked because of the seamless failover and then you point out the graphs and show them hey this is where starlink went offline we failed over and under one second to the secondary 4G LTE and it came back you know 20 minutes later when the Silicon Network sort of recovered from from that outage yeah they had an outage earlier in the year that was a result of the solar flare I haven't seen the root cause analysis as to what the the cause was for the outage only a couple of days ago yeah that's really impressive because businesses rely so heavily on communication the access to the internet these days you know the amount of productivity lost in a 50-person business with the internet for no internet for one hour let alone five minutes is pretty catastrophic and the cost of like um styling service bug per month is so so low in relative to the productivity you can lose from one event really so it's a very cheap insurance policy is the way that I look at it definitely so what's next for nevault well from our perspective you know we're adding more and more infrastructure into our data centers the starlink being available sort of worldwide means that hey we've got 10 data centers in Australia that we can you know do these styling sort of services via and these seamless failover Services via next for us is the New Zealand Market you know we're opening a data center in New Zealand already specced out and ready to go for uh for Auckland um so we can so we'll be able to do our seamless failover technology in uh in New Zealand as well add to that our voice Services data center co-location cloud services means that we know we can offer Channel Partners like red you know the full Suite of telecommunications Solutions that's impressive Brad any other questions you have to write um we did talk once about and I'm not sure if it's relevant for here but you know in Sydney the next DC where you have your presence and where that has uh The Styling point of presence yep did you want to talk a little bit about that and because that ties in with your seamless failover product does it not correct that's right so one of these slides earlier and I'm flicking all the way back through is one of our data centers that I skipped over earlier and one of those data centers is what we call netvault DC4 now this particular facility is this one here bingo so at our DC4 facility this is next DC S1 so we've got a bunch of racks a bunch of uh fiber infrastructure um that runs um a lot of our Sydney Services we've got actually year three data centers in Sydney that we do that via at this data center here is where we've got an interconnect to SpaceX at 10 gigabits per second so because we can access services at 10 gigabits per second within that facility this is how we're able to deliver services like what we did for project Halo the New South Wales floods our seamless failover product is designed around the fact that we've got in a 10gbit connectivity directly to SpaceX that's the only thing anyone else has got that in Australia not sure I'm sure that other people will sort of catch on soon but uh this was sort of uh we we sort of did this as part of project Halo and getting that connectivity to make sure we could do that seamless failover by looking at spacex's Network design and said all right hey can we test this out together and uh you know work it out from there yeah and I guess this is where we are working with radical netvault is to provide for clients who cannot afford to be down you know for the sake of a couple extra hundred bucks a month who cannot afford to be down you know we have customers who run warehouses in remote areas and they need to take orders into process invoices so you know potentially thousands of transactions per hour you know for the additional cost of another layer of Internet redundancy if you like um you know this is what we're working with with radic and probably one thing we didn't touch on again you know what we're talking about here is not for the the mum and dads at home or the people like me who just want to buy a styling connection you should definitely just go on the website um buy the dish but if you have a any kind of complex environment or you rely on your internet you need that uh that that that constant connection that's what we look at either the seamless failover an sd1 type configuration or something like that so you have that kind of guaranteed up guaranteed up time and we're talking what's the price of a dish you know thousand bucks but the half price at the moment if you really want um you've got the installation and then the service can range depending on what you get but you know 150 to 200 per month depending if you have the roaming enabled or not so it's it's really cheap it kind of separates you from all the Australian Telco politics you're completely removed from the Telstra as the optices and the mbns of the world and you're dealing with the satellite technology um completely independent yes run by Elon Musk who's made some questionable decisions as of late but prior to that you know you know there's a reason why he is where he is because he can build rockets that uh can can come back down to earth exactly and this is what we always tell people is that you know the the two most popular styling service types is you know starlink residential at 139 per month or starlink business at 750 per month now when you look at some of these um Telstra vsat trailers and some of these mobile mining sites you know they're paying five thousand dollars per month for connectivity that's you know 10 times slower than what you can get out of starlink so you know 750 a month for a business service for a mining site compared to five thousand dollars a month they're paying for a geosat service you know it's the the technology sells itself yeah and that's probably that's probably a good point actually sorry sorry mate um one thing we didn't go over is probably just again let's I think I'm sure you've got the slide up on your on your in your browser but the way this technology actually works that allows you to deliver speeds like that at that lower latency and why you needed something like a reusable rocket to make it affordable is you need to have you so because uh because starlink is not a geostationary satellite product right so it's a low earth orbit satellite so what I mean by that is if this is the Earth and this is an NBN satellite it's in a geostationary orbit that means that as the Earth rotates the satellite moves with it in order to to achieve that that satellite has to be 36 000 kilometers away from the earth right now the speed of light you know satellite signals can only go so fast right that's just pure physics there's nothing you can do about it right so that's why geostationary satellite services have such a long latency 500 to 600 milliseconds now starlink aren't launching satellites out here their launch satellites here only 550 kilometers away from the earth right I did not know that there you go so and in order to maintain that orbit that satellite must be moving at 26 000 kilometers per hour so you can't just have one satellite you need thousands of them so right now there's uh what 2 900 satellites up there rotating above the Earth just take a minute how cool is that that's pretty cool now there's only 2 900 satellites up there I say only in inverted commas because SpaceX have got plans to get to 4 400 satellites to consider phase one of their constellation complete but then they've got approvals from the FCC to go to 44 000 satellites up there which they'll do at different orbital shells to really blanket the whole planet in high speed low latency internet and if you wouldn't mind so the Gen 1 Gen 2 I'm pretty sure that's the terminology they use is it the Gen 2 that has the the laser yeah which is this next thing that I'll show on the screen here so one of the things that starlink are doing is that they're uh setting up what's called interlaser links space lasers this is real space right so the the idea is that if you've got a satellite sort of out in the middle of the ocean out here right where if I click on that satellite Watch What Happens you can see if I click on it properly because it's already moved on me it shows you know I'll choose this one over here it shows you the area below that satellite that's been lit up with those cells that I spoke at before each satellite beams down about 20 gigabits per second of bandwidth to the area below and when we actually look at um the land mass over Australia you can see these orange dots these orange dots are starlink ground stations right so if I click on one of those ground stations you can see the coverage area that that ground station covers so if I choose a satellite within range of that and you can see these dots means that that satellite's talking back to that ground station that particular satellite is moving at 26 000 kilometers an hour away from that ground station but though that area is what's being lit up right now for users below now each satellite is only going to be in field of view for a particular user for about 90 seconds before the next satellite then has to pick up uh and and take the load for that particular area so that's why SpaceX want more and more satellites more satellites more users more bandwidth you know more more more what does the ground station do in that equation so ground stations I'll show you a a couple of photos of what a ground station looks like so a starlink ground station looks like this a bunch of radar domes right inside those rate inside those radar domes are parabolic antennas that move and track with the satellites now it's those ground stations that are then connected back through to the fiber optic Network right back through to Sydney where spacex's data center is and we conveniently have our data center you know a couple of meters away for that 10 gigabit per second interconnect to be able to deliver you know services that way but I did not know that was a thing I just thought I'd just talk to whatever device so the important thing from a stalactic perspective is that you need to have power and a 100 degree Field view of the sky and as long as the satellite and the ground station are in range then that's what forms that link from the user terminal up to the satellite to the ground station and then Fire by then all the way back through to Sydney for you know interconnects back to the grace of the internet back through to us however else the traffic is supposed to be handled so for Australia all of uh all of starlink services come out of that one data center for now but they will expand on that in the uh in the coming months as well so you go from the the point of presence which is the the purple triangle to the ground stations to the dishes and it becomes this Circle if you like or the system of a network now one other thing I will point out is that uh we we do have a map of all the all the styling areas that are available and uh it's only only in the last month or two that we have full coverage in Australia and that's because those upper parts of you know the Northern Territory in wa you'll see back over here we don't have ground stations in that area and that's because SpaceX don't need them right they're using into those interlaser links between those satellites that are over here in Darwin for example that will beam that signal to another satellite that which then relays it down to a ground station that's how they're able to do Services over the over the ocean in the middle of nowhere are you following that so literally the satellites have lasers and the the laser to each other yeah yeah it's really cool but that's only gen two is it correct the brand new ones and that was actually in the very very early part of one of those videos that I just showed which if I just quickly show this and fast forward you'll see there is a quick shot of this watch this see that's a styling satellite and see the lasers that are linking them together that's how they're able to sort of do that it's seriously yeah seriously nuts that's right that's impressive so you've got to build a relaunchable rocket at first just get that one let that one see you get that done first right yeah and then you've got to build satellites that interconnect via laser it's all very cool I don't know how it comes back to 150 bucks a month for a user to get a dish and and pay for it I think there's some well because you have because you have like if you think about even in the states right and Australia is a great example so so why I'm so passionate about it is because I'm 20 kilometers from the CBD of the third biggest city in Australia and I was forced to use uh the ambience geostationary satellite which let's be frank sucks I suppose it's better than nothing but it sucked you had a 50 gigabyte cap I mean your kids will go through that in the morning watching you know Peppa Pig and uh and Bluey um it's slow you've got the latency so you can't really do a video call because it's it's 600 milliseconds one way right it's it means that you end up talking over each other because of the latencies is so high yeah it kind of works it sucks but it kind of works but literally just think about it like it's 600 one way or a round trip latency round trip so um you've got ping times of 600 milliseconds so half from the time you click a button to this time something happens on your screen on the internet you've literally got to wait half over half a second might not sound like much but when there's dozens of requests going back and forward they all add up so I'm out there 20ks from the CBD and that's in 2022 that's what I had so I put my order in I think it was February the last year 2021 they opened up to take the orders similar to when you buy a Tesla you just kind of go on there and before they were mainstream you'd okay put your 50 bucks down and hope for the best if something does that but it literally I ordered it and once they released it within a week um I had it at my door I took it out of the box I put it on the mount I got the app out and within 5 five minutes I have now have high speed internet at my house and you know if you're in the middle of the desert that's as simple as it is you take this thing you plug it into power and within five minutes you go from no internet no communication um you know Dark Ages kind of stuff to being City faster than a lot of city connection speeds I mean it is game changing world-changing economy changing yeah we had we had one of the first starlink units in the country here um to be able to test and verify and see how things sort of sort of worked and it was great that when you know they started shipping them all fantastic because it was interesting the way that starlink went about their rollout so if we have a look at the global rollout of starlink Australia now has full coverage but it used to be that only the southern tip of Australia had coverage because the way that star liquid have gone about their rollout worldwide is they were starting at the like the North and South Poles because that's easier for them to to cover and then gradually increasing coverage that gradually meets at the equation because of the diameter it's because to do it's to do with the rotation of the the satellites around the earth doing the equator is actually a lot more difficult than the than the edges so that's why they started with that first make sense and I let Elon know that my Caravan was coming in January and I'd need coverage around the country especially in North Queensland when I go into Josh we might have started wrap up there we could talk all afternoon we could but can I can I can I show you one thing that I that I I find fascinating is if you look at the cells that are around Australia it's about starting like it's available uh australia-wide except forgot about this three little spots right right there's this big spot over here in wa and two spots in New South Wales where starlink is not available why do you think that might be I mean I'm not going to cheat listening political um no he just go to it's where they research aliens man actually you're not far off so over here in wa this is the csiro's square kilometer array this is where they do deep space exploration and they don't want any interference it's actually called the West Australian radio quiet zone so there's no there's no uh signals allowed in that area so it doesn't interfere with that deep space exploration really cool similar for those two dots yeah so down here is the park Space Telescope so another big sort of a Space Telescope where they don't want any interference on radio signals and again another Space Telescope over here so it's all to do with deep space exploration and starlink are not allowed to use any frequencies in there for uh that they would normally be using for sending signals up and down but there are towns around the New South Wales one so you would be pretty dirty if you lived there yeah yeah I think you would be you'd be on the geostationary yeah right thanks for coming in now but it's really impressive The Innovation you've done with starlinks and what you've got going on in the future I really appreciate you sharing and um people are listening you probably want to do this one on YouTube probably not so much on on podcast because it was pretty exciting that some of the stuff you shared so really appreciate that if anyone wants to get in touch with you how can they reach you better to reach out to us is uh just to have a look at our website www.netvault.net.edu or send us an email

sales netvault.netu appreciate it thank you very much [Music]

2022-12-28 05:23

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