Campaigner Lee Longmire is pushing to have special data packs available for students and farm businesses who would otherwise face massive costs in keeping up to date.

Mrs Longmire, who spoke to a parliamentary inquiry into the rollout of the NBN, has been campaigning for improvements in the so-called Sky Muster satellite service, which she says leave rural and regional communities at a disadvantage.

“A lot of work has been done, but so much more still remains,” she said.

Mrs Longmire said Sky Muster allowances recently increased, but there is no option for multiple services or allowance for students, whose education increasingly relies on the internet.

For Mrs Longmire, who has two children at school in Narrandera, a husband who farms the family property at Sandigo and a need to work from home, the services offered by Sky Muster are not good enough.

“The service goes nowhere near giving satellite users equity or parity with fixed wireless or cable NBN customers,” she said.

The problems, Mrs Longmire said, are myriad. Plans are expensive and the data allowances quite low and there are often no options to provide more than one service to the same address.

Mrs Longmire said the off-peak period for Sky Muster was between 1am and 7am, so many rural students had to get up in the middle of the night to download their school work when rates were cheaper.

“As transactions and interactions with businesses, education and government increasingly become exclusively online, satellite and the current data allowances just won’t keep up,” she said.

It is not just families in regional and isolated areas that are facing problems with internet access.

Alida Rushby lives just 10 kilometres from The Rock, yet her family struggles with phone reception, as well as internet access,and relies mostly on data from mobiles.

“I have two kids in high school and four more in primary school and they are at a disadvantage,” Mrs Rushby said.