Musk’s satellites transmit data faster than NBN’s Sky Muster: ACCC

Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites transmit data faster than the NBN’s Sky Muster services, the competition watchdog has found in its first quarterly report comparing the performance of satellites.

Starlink satellites, which orbit between 550 and 1200 kilometres above the earth, provide higher average download speeds consistently throughout the day before weakening in the evenings but have a higher daily rate of outages, the ACCC said after analysing connections to broadband services in September.

The pace of services that use the NBN’s two satellites, which are almost 40,000 kilometres above the earth, “decrease drastically” during the evening to 57 per cent of plan speeds