SKY MUSTER and the University of New England are teaming up to live stream SMART Farm data into their AgQuip stall next month.
UNE’s Precision Agriculture Research Group leader David Lamb said it was a great chance to illustrate the power of satellite NBN.
“It comes from a mutual will to push forward the agenda of connecting up Australian farms,” he said.
“We will literally have a ute parked there with a dish on-board tracking the Sky Muster satellite and bringing in the live data.”
Sky Muster is already delivering high-speed broadband to rural and remote Australians across the country.
With their second satellite, Sky Muster II, set to launch in October, the two satellites are expected to give 400,000 Australians access to high-speed broadband by 2020.
The system is capable of 25mb/s download speed, which is around five times what people can currently access.
But its main constraint is the requirement to link directly to the house or single location.
Professor Lamb said he foresaw a future where people could have their own little dishes that could go anywhere and still remain connected.
“That’s the true potential power of an NBN satellite,” he said.
“It would offer an enormous capability because at the end of the day farming occurs all over the land.
“But it would be lovely to have a mobile solution available.”
The SMART Farm currently runs on fiber.
But part of the next development phase of is to link with the NBN satellite and have every form of connectivity available as part of their demonstration package.
Having phone, fiber, fixed wifi and satellite will mean that if someone comes to the farm with a problem they would like to test, and they only have satellite, the farm can switch over to satellite and emulate the problem that they're having.
“The farming future is going to put some pretty serious demands on broadband connectivity but that's a challenge rather than a problem,” professor Lamb said.
