Let’s be honest about the NBN in the Grampians. If you’re on fixed wireless or satellite (Sky Muster), you already know. The speeds are inconsistent, the latency is rough for video calls, and the data caps on satellite plans make working from home genuinely difficult some months.

I’ve been talking to remote workers across the region — from Halls Gap to Ararat to Stawell — about what they’re actually using to stay connected in 2026. The picture is more interesting than I expected.

The NBN situation hasn’t changed much

NBN Co made noise in 2024 about upgrading fixed wireless towers and improving Sky Muster capacity. And to be fair, some areas did see modest improvements. But the fundamental issue remains: if you’re more than a few kilometres from a tower, your experience degrades quickly.

A graphic designer in Pomonal told me she gets 25 Mbps on a good day, 8 Mbps on a bad one. “When it rains, I might as well close the laptop,” she said. Her partner works in IT support and needs stable video connections — something NBN fixed wireless just can’t guarantee.

According to NBN Co’s own coverage data, most of the Grampians region falls into the fixed wireless or satellite footprint. The fibre and fixed line connections that city workers take for granted don’t exist out here.

Starlink has become the default for serious remote workers

I spoke to eleven remote workers across the Grampians for this piece. Seven of them had switched to Starlink, and an eighth was in the process of ordering.

The consensus: it’s not perfect, but it’s dramatically better than what was available before.

Typical speeds people reported were 80-150 Mbps download, with latency around 25-40ms. That’s more than enough for video conferencing, large file uploads, and even some cloud-based development work. Several people mentioned they could finally use Teams and Zoom without the constant “you’re on mute… no, you’ve frozen” dance.

The downsides came up too. The dish needs a clear view of the sky, which is tricky if you’re surrounded by tall eucalypts. One bloke near Moyston had to mount his dish on a 6-metre pole to clear the tree line. Cost him $800 just for the installation.

Monthly pricing has come down since launch — it’s sitting around $99/month for the residential plan in early 2026 — but the upfront hardware cost of $599 still stings. And there are occasional outages, usually lasting a few minutes, that can be annoying mid-call.

The other alternatives people are trying

Starlink isn’t the only option. A few other approaches came up in my conversations:

Optus 5G Home Internet. If you’re lucky enough to be in range of an Optus tower with 5G capability, this is competitive. One person in Ararat gets 100+ Mbps consistently. But coverage is patchy — step a few kilometres out of town and you lose it.

Telstra 4G/5G backup. Several people run Starlink as primary and a Telstra mobile broadband connection as backup. The failover setup costs extra but means they’re never completely offline. For anyone whose livelihood depends on connectivity, the redundancy is worth it.

Local WISP providers. There are a couple of small wireless internet service providers operating in the region. Central Highlands Internet and a few others offer point-to-point wireless connections. Speeds and reliability vary hugely depending on your line of sight to their towers, but some users swear by them.

Bonded connections. A couple of the more technically savvy workers are bonding multiple connections together — typically Starlink plus a 4G connection — using a device like a Peplink router. It’s overkill for most people, but if you need rock-solid uptime for mission-critical work, it’s effective.

What this means for the region

Here’s the thing that excites me about all this. The Grampians has always had the lifestyle appeal for remote workers. Affordable housing, stunning natural environment, strong community. The only thing holding it back was connectivity.

That barrier is falling. Not because of government infrastructure spending — the NBN rollout in regional areas has been, at best, underwhelming. It’s falling because commercial alternatives like Starlink have filled the gap.

I’m seeing real consequences. A software developer moved to Halls Gap from Melbourne last year specifically because Starlink made it viable. A marketing consultant in Great Western told me she’d have moved back to Geelong without it. A small accounting firm in Stawell has three staff working remotely from home, all on Starlink, and they’re billing the same hours as when everyone was in the office.

The gap that still needs closing

It’s not all rosy. Starlink requires an upfront investment and ongoing cost that not everyone can afford. For lower-income residents or small businesses on thin margins, the digital divide hasn’t closed — it’s just shifted.

And there are legitimate questions about long-term Starlink reliability as more satellites go up and more users come online. SpaceX’s track record of maintaining service quality at scale will need watching.

The Victorian government’s Connecting Victoria programme has funded some improvements, but progress has been slow. More targeted subsidies for remote workers in underserved areas would make a real difference.

Bottom line

If you’re working remotely from the Grampians in 2026, the practical answer is Starlink with a 4G backup. It’s not the answer the NBN was supposed to be, but it works. And for a region with this much to offer, “it works” is enough to keep people coming.