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Peter Griffin’s consumer tech columns appear fortnightly on listener.co.nz
On holiday in Rarotonga a couple of weeks ago, I had my first experience using Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite broadband service that has amassed nearly 40,000 New Zealand customers.
The Starlink access ideally could have come a day sooner. While I was holidaying with friends at an Airbnb on the southern coast of Rarotonga, overlooking the Ava’avaroa passage where turtles congregate, I worked for a couple of hours each morning.
However, a lengthy national outage of the Vodafone mobile network, which affected Rarotonga and the outer Cook Islands, kept me offline for a morning. The very next day, a technician arrived at the Airbnb to install Starlink. The Cook Islands had just licensed Starlink there.
After scrambling around on the roof for half an hour installing the square-shaped satellite receiver, he fed a cable through a hole he’d drilled and plugged in the Starlink router. Within minutes, I was surfing the web via satellite at an impressive 290Mbps (megabits per second), on par with the speed I enjoy via my fibre broadband connection in Wellington. I got all of my work done, taking advantage of the time zone difference to get some projects done before my colleagues back in New Zealand rolled into work.
Starlink relies on a network of about 6300 satellites in low Earth orbit, and ground stations in many countries, New Zealand included, that act as a relay network, connecting customers to internet backbones on the ground.
New Zealand has become one of the most enthusiastic adopters of Starlink satellite broadband on a per-capita basis. The Commerce Commission said 37,000 connections were active by mid last year. That number will have passed 40,000 by now as cut-price offers on Starlink hardware have sweetened the deal.
While Starlink isn’t the only player in the New Zealand market offering satellite broadband connections, the fact that you can relatively easily install Starlink yourself and its decent connection speeds has meant it has cleaned up in the rural broadband market.
In 2022, the Labour government launched the $15 million Remote Users Scheme, offering a subsidy to homeowners in patchy coverage areas of up to $2000 to get a satellite broadband connection installed.
Despite ploughing the best part of $800m into extending connectivity, rural dwellers still have slower, less reliable and more expensive broadband. While the $159 per month full-speed Starlink plan comes at a premium to regular broadband (a $79 Starlink “deprioritised” connection offers lower speeds at peak times), it could offer a viable option for the government to extend broadband coverage rapidly.
But that comes with a major risk.
“There’s no question that Starlink is a total game-changer,” Telecommunications Commissioner Tristan Gilbertson told the Herald in May. “But we would have to have a conversation as a country about what it would mean to have 13% of New Zealanders relying on Starlink,” he added.
Trouble in Brazil
Last week’s events in Brazil suggest we need to have that conversation sooner rather than later. Starlink has at least 250,000 customers in Brazil, including the military, which uses it to connect outlying bases.
But a dispute between Elon Musk and the Brazilian government about Musk’s other business, the social media platform X, threatened disruptions to the Starlink service there. X is now banned in Brazil, where it has an estimated 40 million users, after Musk refused to order the platform to take down content Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court deemed was promoting hate speech and disinformation.
A free speech maximalist, Musk launched into a tirade in a post on X against Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who he compared to a dictator. But he overplayed his hand.
While Brazilian internet providers followed their government’s order to block traffic to X, it became clear that the social platform was still available to Starlink users in Brazil. The Superior Electoral Court responded by issuing an order to seize Starlink’s assets, arguing that it was part of the same “economic group” as X.
Just as it looked like the fight might escalate to the point where Musk pulled the plug on Starlink in Brazil, he backed down, agreeing to follow the X ban and stating that he would continue to offer the Starlink service, including to the Brazilian military.
Musk has had tense moments concerning Starlink before, including over who can access the service in war zones like Ukraine and Gaza. But this was the first time the billionaire entrepreneur saw his successful, fast-growing satellite service drawn into a conflict over censorship and freedom of speech.
Still, it’s an issue he’s prepared to make a stand on - even if it costs him his social media business in Brazil. Musk recently tussled with the Australian government, which in May won an injunction against X over video footage of a knife attack at a Sydney church that was circulating on the platform. Musk refused to have the footage taken down globally, instead geoblocking it to prevent access in Australia.
Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman, later withdrew the case against X after a court judge declined to extend the injunction, a legal win for Musk and X.
Our government has abandoned its predecessor’s efforts to beef up hate speech laws, which could have given it a stronger legislative mandate to force social media platforms to moderate content. But Starlink still has to follow our legal framework, including blocking content or turning off the network if requested by the government.
If Musk was to go toe-to-toe over a free speech issue with politicians here, the leverage would come in the form of the Starlink local points of presence (POPs) on the ground, which the government could take control of.
Under International Telecommunication Union (ITU) treaties, Starlink must get permission from each country where it offers services and has to be issued a radio spectrum usage licence for New Zealand, which could be revoked. Shipments of Starlink terminals could also be blocked.
So there are plenty of ways Musk could be brought into line if he goes rogue with Starlink over a free speech issue by refusing to block access to objectionable material. But would he be willing to deliberately pull the plug on New Zealand users over a point of principle?
That’s the bigger question our own politicians will be pondering as they eye up the significant growth of Starlink as a rural broadband player here, particularly as One NZ looks to launch text-to-satellite services that could provide a lifeline in emergencies and which rely on Starlink satellites for coverage.
It would set a terrible precedent to abandon paying customers and leave them with useless satellite equipment. Musk has signed contracts with the likes of the US Department of Defence under “unique terms and conditions” which aren’t found in its contracts with regular users and likely include guarantees against arbitrary service termination and enhanced cybersecurity measures.
Average users aren’t so lucky and paying month to month, Starlink could simply decide to shut down in our region with little notice given. It would be a disastrous commercial move. But Musk’s ideology and business interests are increasingly interlinked. He took a bath on Twitter to the tune of US$25 billion after taking it over and reimagining it as his version of the world’s digital town square, with much-reduced content moderation in place. Advertisers have fled the platform in response.
His commercial rivalry with another tech billionaire Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns rocket company Blue Origin, which competes with SpaceX, is perhaps the greatest factor that would dissuade Musk from ever wielding Starlink access as a bargaining chip. Blue Origin is gearing up to launch its own satellite broadband service and recently secured land to operate ground operations here.
Telecommunications Commissioner Gilbertson says new entrants, including Amazon, are expected, which is likely to “further intensify competitive dynamics”.
“Starlink is already trying to get ahead of this by offering a ‘deprioritised’ service that, so far, seems to deliver speeds close to its standard service for a lower price,” he added.
The last thing Musk would want to do is hand his rival a massive customer base, and the revenue that goes with it. Still, the volatility of Musk and the way the Brazilian dispute rapidly escalated demands caution around how reliant we want to become on satellite providers beaming us broadband from afar.
