Australia's digital frontier is being rewired from fibre rolls and roadside trenches to vast satellite constellations orbiting thousands of kilometres above Earth.

And the engineers of this revolution are not Australian agencies but US tech titans Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.

The latest front in the new space race came on Monday, when Musk's SpaceX announced a $25 billion cash-and-stock deal to secure valuable "S-Band" spectrum in the US, as well as its global licenses, from US telecommunications company EchoStar.

For Starlink, SpaceX's satellite broadband arm, the acquisition gives Musk's company something it has never had before: mobile spectrum rights.

This means its satellites can now talk directly to smartphones without dishes or other equipment, on its own frequencies rather than on

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