The Starlink connection
SINCE the arrival of SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband Internet services to Fiji through its satellite coverage and the green light from Fiji’s telecom regulator TAF (Telecommunications Authority of Fiji) last November, Australian technology service provider NETVAULT has been busy installing Starlink business solutions for Fijian customers, which so far have included a number of major hotels. People have even mistaken the company for Starlink, which the company representative stressed is not the case when The Fiji Times caught up with them during their recent trip to Fiji. The company in fact has a commercial agreement with SpaceX to modify and re-sell Starlink dishes to business, enterprise and government. The Fiji Times spoke to NETVAULT technical director Radek Tkaczyk and managing director Belinda Gahan on the work the company is doing in Fiji.
FT: What’s the price? That’s mostly the basic question that a lot of people ask?
NETVAULT: Well, it depends who’s asking, because we are supplying corporate entities, business and government, mainly because we do a seamless failover technology. The issue that a lot of people have with Starlink when they’re using it for business is that it drops out. So it might be a very short drop out for a few seconds or it might be longer for a few minutes. What it means is that often they will then have to reconnect if they’re doing video conferencing or something like that. But NETVAULT’s seamless failover technology makes it so that when those dropouts happen, you don’t even notice because it automatically goes on to a secondary connection, which might be 4G, 5G or something like that. And you can even have a tertiary connection. FT: That’s all provided by NETVAULT? NETVAULT: Yes. We call it seamless failover for Starlink and usually we’ll failover to like a 4G LTE or 5G if it happens to be available as an alternate connection. Because the way that the technology works is that we’ll have a Starlink connection as a primary and then failover to 4G LTE in under one second. And because we failover in under one second, TCP IP retransmits and the TCP window sizes don’t even notice a one second drop out like that because we maintain the same public static IP address as part of that. That’s part of the technologies that we’re sort of bringing here to Fiji to augment and improve on the base Starlink service.
FT: So how do you relate to Starlink? A lot of people are confused. They think you’re Starlink.
NETVAULT: We are not Starlink. We have our own technologies which are the seamless failover and that sort of thing. We can import the Starlink dishes from Australia or New Zealand because we have an Australian entity, we have a New Zealand entity and we can bring the dishes in from those countries and we can do the installation. We can do the seamless failover technologies, management, monitoring, technical support all those addons that we add on to the base Starlink product. FT: So yours is the seamless failover gadget? NETVAULT: Yes. We can do a complete solution. So a complete solution with the primary connection from the Starlink service along with the 4G LTE. We provide a full end to end solution of that. So we design and implement that based on
what the needs of the business are. And that’s partly why we don’t do residential connections, home connections, mum and dad type services. We only service business government and enterprise. FT: Because it’s really expensive?
NETVAULT: Not that it’s expensive. It’s just that at NETVAULT, we’re geared towards looking after those key markets. We don’t look after the home residential market because we don’t have anything really to offer the home residential market because they are not going to want to pay for the seamless failover technology or need multiple connections or need the support and monitoring and everything like a business does. FT: So Starlink right now is available for businesses only? NETVAULT: If you go to starlink.com, it won’t be available here in Fiji (for residential customers). We are doing the business, commercial services, those are available now. So we are bringing it from Australia and from New Zealand and Starlink now has a license to provide the actual connectivity in Fiji so that has been granted. FT: So there is a separation between Starlink and NETVAULT? NETVAULT: Yes. We are not Starlink but we’re using the technology to improve the connectivity. We have a problem in Australia and everywhere where if you just have the one connection, and it drops out, so if you’re doing a video conference, which you know we do a lot, especially post COVID, or online learning, which was a big problem in Australia, with all the school kids at home on their computers, and that connection drops out then what they have to do is go over, log back in again, wait for the connection to come back, start up the program again to log-in to the meeting and wait for the person hosting the meeting to let them into the meeting and then start their learning again. One of the biggest problems with Starlink is those dropouts. So a Starlink service will drop out between five to 10 times a day. Now these dropouts could be two to three seconds you might not notice it, but could be as long as two to three minutes. It’s those longer dropouts that cause a big problem from a business perspective. So that’s where the NETVAULT seamless failover technology allows the failover from the primary Starlink to a 4G LTE in under one second. And because it’s so fast for the failover, your zoom meetings, your teams meetings, even mobile phone calls, they will just continue through. And we also aggregate multiple Starlink dishes so a Starlink dish will typically give you about 100 to 200 megabits per second on the download speed and 10 to 20 megabits per second on the upload speed so we can aggregate multiple dishes together and give an even higher performance and higher reliability link. FT: What does NETVAULT do as a company? NETVAULT: We focus on three core product pillars: Internet services, telephony services, and cloud services. So the Starlink product really falls underneath that Internet category for us. We deal with 42 different wholesale carriers (in Australia) to deliver solutions for our clients, be it Telstra, Optus, Vodafone. Starlink becomes just another one of those carriers for us to design solutions. So that’s why it’s important that people know that we are not Starlink. Starlink is just one of the connection types we can use to deliver a complete solution for a client. So for example, somebody like Sofitel comes to us and says: “we want an internet solution.” We then give them options of what all of the different options are. So obviously in Fiji that’s quite limited as to what the different options are. But in Australia we have 42 different options. So we’ll come back and we’ll say look, in your circumstance, your business, these are the options that we would recommend for you, these are what the costs are going to be, this is how good it’s going to be, these are the types of speeds you’re going to get but it’s from a spread of 42 different possible carriers and Starlink is just one of those and there will be more, for example OneWeb. OneWeb will be available in Fiji in the next two or three months and again, that will be another option that we can offer the Fijian market. There’s also Amazon’s Project Kuiper. It’s going to be worldwide. But that’s still at least two to three years away. One web is already available in Australia, for example, Fiji in the next couple of months, so that will be another option that we have. The disadvantage of OneWeb is at cost perspective, it’s a lot more expensive than Starlink. But it does have a lot of advantages, like guaranteed speeds, service level agreements, technical support, because you don’t really get any technical support from a Starlink perspective. You can’t call Starlink. You can’t email them. All you can do is go to the website, enter your credit card details, and then a box arrives at your door. The rest is up to you to install it, to get it up and running, to configure it, and if you don’t know how to do that, you need someone to help you with that. Which is what we do.
FT: So you go to where Starlink has the license then you go in and provide your service?
NETVAULT: It depends on the license for the particular country. For example we came to Fiji first, just on holidays and this was just after we had experienced flooding in Australia, where we had big trouble with flooding, especially in northern New South Wales.So we came over to Fiji on holidays and saw that there was a really big need here. Because if we go on a holiday, we really need to feel like we can look into any issue that might come up with the business and continue to work at least a bit while we’re on holiday. And so the first question we asked when we look at where we are we going to go for holidays is: what’s the Internet connectivity like? Many hotels didn’t have the Internet that would allow us be able to go on holidays because we wouldn’t be able to do any work while we were
here. We looked at things like the school, there’s no Internet access there. The cost to bring Internet that’s not satellite internet is phenomenal. We were looking at one of the islands where they shot the American (television series) Survivor and were told they paid a couple of million dollars to install fibre line there but they bounced that between radios, microwaves and fibre and it cost an absolute fortune. So we thought, hey, surely we can do this better. The great thing is that the technology that Starlink offers is 10 times faster than what you can get from a traditional satellite service, but it’s also 10 times cheaper. So that’s why business,
government, enterprises are really looking not only for additional connectivity but also cost savings as well. FT: Your support infrastructure?
NETVAULT: We have 10 data centres around Australia that we aggregate our services via and all those facilities are proper enterprise grade facilities, you know, the big cloud providers are using. Now we don’t own these buildings. We lease space in those buildings and then put our own fibre, our own storage, our own servers to deliver our product around it. So this particular facility (one of the buildings in Sydney) is very important, because we have here a
10 gigabit per second interconnect to SpaceX here at this particular data centre. That’s how we’re able to do this. That’s all the infrastructure that supports our operation, and how we’re able to do this in Australia and New Zealand and now Fiji. FT: So you’re building one in Fiji as well?
NETVAULT: At this stage probably not. We don’t need to because for SpaceX, everything is backhauled to Sydney. They will change that, most likely to backhaul that to New Zealand, to Auckland, and when they do, then we’ll get another interconnect at that point to make that connection. So that’s how we’re doing that. Fiji probably doesn’t have the population to support this kind of infrastructure to be physically there because to put in this kind of infrastructure, it’s incredibly expensive. And the facilities that we put our equipment in have to be the absolute top of the line best ones. So everything has redundancy and redundancy and redundancy and redundancy. So, you know, we can’t be without power or Internet or anything, it just can’t happen. Reliability is of utmost importance, so redundancy across all of the data centres as well and within each data centre, within each service, within each country, at every level. FT: How different is Starlink from a traditional satellite Internet provider? NETVAULT: It’s a Low Earth Orbit, so if this is the earth and this is a geostationary satellite – you have a couple here in the Pacific – the distance from the
Earth to that satellite is 36,000 kilometres. 36,721 to be exact, because it’s geostationary, which means that as the earth rotates, satellite moves with it, so it’s always an exact same spot in the sky. What Starlink is doing is they’re not launching satellites out here (at 36,000km). They’re launching satellites here – 550km above the earth, as opposed to 36,000km. So that distance is 20 times closer, therefore, physics says that’s going to be 20 times faster. The problem with having a satellite so close to the earth though, is that in order for that satellite to maintain that orbit, that satellite needs to be moving at 26,000km per hour. So you can’t have just one. It’s a network of satellites. So this here (refers to live satellite tracker) is every single Starlink satellite that’s up there at the moment. We zoom in on Fiji and right now (at the time of this interview), 12 satellites are in view. But this is moving and this (tracker) is updating. These satellites are moving around the earth at 26,000km per hour. So, geostationary is stationary by moving with the earth while these ones are just moving. When they deploy them out, they deploy them at such speed so that they maintain the orbit. When the satellites are actually deployed, they’re deployed at about 100 km above the earth. Those satellites then have onboard ion thrusters that fire to raise them to the operational orbit of 550 km where they’ll sit, rotating for the next four to five years. At the end of that four to five years, those ion thrusters
then fire again to de-orbit the satellites, where they then re-enter the earth’s atmosphere and burn up completely and not a single thing touches the ground. So right now, there are 5169 satellites rotating above the earth, of which 2333 are operational, 3169 have what’s called inter laser links, and that’s how Fiji is being serviced. These satellites beam the signal to each other until it gets over a ground station above Sydney and then it comes down to the ground station. FT: We have a ground station here in Fiji.
NETVAULT: Right now it’s not active. Everything is beamed back down to Sydney. They will activate that later when they need to and go to Auckland with a fibre optic cable that way. That (Fiji ground station) was put in as a result of the volcanic eruption in Tonga So that’s how that sort of all works and from a coverage perspective, all of Australia is covered, all of New Zealand is covered and now Fiji is fully covered including the waters in between, all now covered with Starlink. FT: Some folks are buying connections in Australia and New Zealand to send to their relatives in the islands and it works.
NETVAULT: It’ll work here for two months then after two months, it’ll stop working because it’s not supposed to be here permanently. So it’ll work here but according to the Starlink terms and conditions, after two months, they could stop it. FT: Any idea when Starlink will begin in Fiji for residential customers? NETVAULT: You can go to starlink.com and you enter your credit card details. They haven’t given a firm date. It was supposed to be “Quarter One, 2024” (for Fiji) but it’s changed now to just “starting in 2024”. FT: The interest that’s coming in Fiji is for Starlink? NETVAULT: Yes. Starlink at the moment because TAF has approved the permanent license for Starlink as of November last year, so it’s something new that is now available in Fiji, so everybody wants to know, is it going to be better than what they’ve currently got, is it going to be too expensive, what are the parameters going to be? And what we’re finding is we can deploy a solution much more cheaply than what people are currently getting. FT: How much cheaper? NETVAULT: Well, it depends on the solution, really. So there are solutions that we can do as low as $500 a month. There are some solutions that are $5,000 per month, so it really depends on what solutions are needed. FT: So the next best thing we can get to a Starlink support service is NETVAULT?
NETVAULT: This is the void that we’re trying to fill to make Starlink suitable for business use. So because you cannot contact them, an important part of our offering is we do the monitoring. So we install the actual monitoring nodes and we monitor the connections. So we have all of this data that we share with our customers about their Internet connection, so we can troubleshoot and provide the management, the technical support, all the monitoring so if there’s an issue, there is someone to call. You can call us and we can help you troubleshoot it, fix the issues, we keep spare equipment if necessary and we have 24-7 365 days Australian-based technical support and monitoring. So if you call NETVAULT, you get a person usually in Australia, one of our team, they have access and they can look up all these details because you’ve got your NETVAULT monitoring node there and you can find out what happened.