Experts corralled for Sky Muster
NBN Co is ploughing resources into fixing the troubled Sky Muster satellite service.
The national broadband firm is hiring new engineers and “solution architects” to tackle what NBN Co CEO Bill Morrow has admitted is an “exorbitant” number of network failures.
Users continue to report regular outages and dropouts on the Sky Muster service, which was designed to provide consistent internet access to customers in the most remote parts of the country.
NBN Co’s recruitment drive is reportedly looking to tackle two key issues - remediating the existing problems and improving procurement practices and the overall design of the Sky Muster service.
Around half of the new hires will be tasked with “[reducing] the number of incidences exceeding threshold by active monitoring and management of network capacity against KPI threshold for systems”.
Others will be asked to “analyse and synthesise data from a number of disparate sources in order to develop strategic recommendations on how best to optimise the lifetime, availability and performance of the satellite platform”.
NBN Co hopes to optimise “baseband systems, air resource management, modulation schemes, statistical multiplexing, timing, traffic management, mobility, SMTS [satellite modem termination systems] etc. and the associated interactions of the access network with the end user terminals (VSAT) and the satellite core network".
Meanwhile, new satellite architects will be hired to come up with enhancements and new capabilities to derive more profit from Sky Muster.