NBN’s Inevitable Switch to LEO
- Caleb Henry
- Aug 7
- 2 min read
August 7, 2025 - Written by Caleb Henry

Few countries have been as forward-leaning when rolling out universal broadband access as Australia. In 2009, the country set up the National Broadband Network Company (NBN Co., later just NBN) to deploy connectivity infrastructure across the world’s sixth largest nation.
While the main focus of that push was fiber and other terrestrial hardware, NBN realized it would need satellites to connect the more than 3 million citizens living in rural or remote regions. And so the ~AUD $2 billion Sky Muster program was born: two high-throughput (HTS) geostationary satellites, launched in 2015 and 2016, bringing a collective 135 Gbps of capacity, a 30-fold increase in Australia’s satcom supply.
Even with that huge leap, Sky Muster was plagued with low data speeds within two years of launch, accompanied by a steady stream of local complaints. The service struggled to keep up with rising data speeds uncomfortably early into the satellites’ 15-year design lives. Sky Muster peaked in 2021 with around 111,000 subscribers, but once Starlink entered the Australian market, it never recovered.
NBN kicked off an AUD $750M network upgrade in 2022 that added fixed wireless tower access to more than 120,000 homes and businesses whose only choice was Sky Muster. Completed in December 2024, the Fixed Wireless and Satellite Upgrade Program (FWSUP) was meant to reduce network congestion, but that effort was insufficient to prevent customer attrition.
In 2023, the same year Starlink eclipsed Sky Muster subscribers, NBN began exploring connectivity options from low Earth orbit providers. At the time, Jason Ashton, NBN Co Executive General Manager for Fixed Wireless and Satellite, framed the evaluation as exploratory, saying LEO connectivity “could be a part of our network in the future.”
With this week’s announcement between NBN and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, it would appear the future is now, and the future is LEO. NBN wants Kuiper to cover more than 300,000 locations, and anticipates service in mid-2026.
LEO broadband networks have the potential to scale well beyond the size of GEO satellite fleets, allowing operators to steadily increase total capacity. Sky Muster didn’t scale, and improvements in network capacity weren’t enough to keep customers from jumping to commercial LEO solutions. The writing was on the wall for years. Now, Kuiper just needs to get its satellites on orbit and its service deployed.