Sydney – IPSTAR Australia, a subsidiary of Thaicom Public Company Limited said that it welcomed an opportunity to commit its satellite capacity to NBN and was already in discussions with NBN Co about solving the rural broadband issue. Having already demonstrated NBN grade services in Canberra recently, IPSTAR believes it is well placed to provide a quick launch for NBN Co’s rural high speed broadband. To date, consumer services up to 4Mbps have been available by IPSTAR and its ABG accredited service providers. “Few people realise that IPSTAR service providers accredited with the existing government ABG subsidy are already leading the way for consumer satellite broadband speeds on a global scale today,” said IPSTAR general manager, Supoj Chinveeraphan, Ph.D. “Consumers will definitely represent the majority of the services we’ll connect in Australia; however we are also going to set a new bench mark for economical satellite broadband business solutions,” Supoj added. IPSTAR said that in its discussions with the government and NBN Co to date it had volunteered approaches to solving the rural broadband problem and highlighted long term capacity requirements along with the challenges. “Even with 75,000 customers installed and connected already, we still have significant satellite capacity available today and Thaicom-4 isn’t going anywhere for at least the next 10 years. We’ll continue talking with NBN Co about how we deliver decent broadband services now and in parallel to any other satellite that goes up in the future,” said IPSTAR sales manager, Phil Cross. He added “As you’d expect, we’re more than ready to contribute our existing capacity to the larger NBN rural broadband requirement.” In the meantime IPSTAR will continue deploying rural services with its service providers and the existing ABG subsidy scheme until an alternative approach is executed.