The first Sky Muster satellite was launched in 2015 to provide broadband connectivity to regional and remote Australia.

The second, Sky Muster II satellite, was launched in October 2016 to cover Tasmania’s remote areas. 

Statistics show out of the 14,800 eligible premises, about 3307 are connected to the satellite.

But Labor’s regional communications spokesman Stephen Jones described the deployment “and the chronic lack of transparency” of the Sky Muster program as “abysmal”.

He said only 17 per cent of eligible premises have taken up Sky Muster, compared to 35 per cent for fixed wireless and 47 per cent for fixed-line NBN.

“There’s a myriad of problems with Sky Muster, including installation issues, frequent outages and a frustrating lack of transparency between NBN Co and retail service providers, not to mention the severe data restrictions,” he said.

“There is no end to consumer complaints about the installation process, about service reliability and about data limits.”

Mr Jones said there was a “lot of customer concern” about many aspects of the Sky Muster service.

“It's not uncommon for people to have three of four dropouts a day,” he said. 

“If you're running a business or using it to educate your children that's just not good enough.”

Mr Jones said as much of the population as possible should be connected to fixed-line NBN.

“If you live in regional Australia access to broadband is more important to you than people in the cities,” he said.  

NBN Tasmania corporate affairs manager Russell Kelly acknowledged the problems with the service.

“Some satellite users have had interruptions in the first twelve months, and NBN has been working hard to improve the service based on customer feedback,” he said. 

“We now have a more stable and better performing service with the weekly incident rate down by 80 per cent to achieve industry best practice levels.”