Jason Paris: One NZ, one year on - and what’s next, from Starlink to AI

One NZ chief executive Jason Paris on his company’s hook-up with Elon Musk’s Starlink and whether it will meet a looming deadline; whether he’d be brave enough to host Musk at the service’s launch; the first anniversary of the shift from Vodafone NZ; AI; and a restructure that’s claimed 200 jobs. Plus: A marketing expert gives his verdict on the rebrand.

A year ago today, Jason Paris hitched himself to Elon Musk’s bandwagon — or at least his Starship.

As the Vodafone NZ chief executive announced his firm was rebranding to One NZ, the chief executive also revealed a tie-up with Starlink, the satellite network owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Starlink’s “cell towers in the sky” (aka a new generation of low Earth-orbiting satellites capable of communicating with regular smartphones) would deliver text messages to One NZ customers outside mobile coverage areas by the end of 2024, with voice and data via space to follow in 2025.

Even some of Musk’s biggest fans admit he often misses deadlines (just ask Tesla Cybertruck buyers), and his firm’s massive Starship rocket — required to launch the larger, next-generation Starlink satellites that will support voice and internet — has only staged its first successful test flight on its third attempt (albeit with a failure to self-land).

The Commerce Commission was a sceptic , sending One NZ a “stop now” letter in July related to its “100% mobile coverage” campaign. The telco said it was phasing out that tagline anyway in favour of “Coverage like never before with SpaceX”.

Paris — who wore a polo shirt sporting both One NZ and SpaceX logos to his Herald interview (not to mention his “lucky shoes”, sporting custom Warriors decals) — is naturally still a believer. But will text via satellite happen before the end of 2024?

“The service will definitely be live this year,” Paris said. “You’ll have mobile-to-satellite text capability. It’ll just depend how much of any given hour you will be able to text. The more satellites that you have in space, the more time that you are connected.”

Starlink’s “swarm” approach means as one satellite disappears over the horizon, another takes over — but more will have to be launched for continuous coverage.

“The ambition is that there will be no more than a minute-and-a-half intervals within any given hour where a text message can’t be sent or responded to. And that basically means we need a certain number of satellites up in the sky to make that happen [by the end of 2024].”