Starlink satellites will soon bring near total cell coverage to New Zealand. What might that mean? Duncan Greive watches One NZ head to space.

Lompoc sits low in the valley of the Santa Ynez river, part of the vast Californian hinterlands between the great metropolises of Los Angeles and San Francisco. It has pretty, Spanish-inflected architecture and calls itself the “city of arts and flowers”, a description that rubs a little uneasily against its neighbour, the Vandenberg Space Force Base, one of the most cutting-edge elements of the United States’ military industrial complex. 

It’s been launching satellites since the 1950s, but lately it’s more likely to be private space missions heading up from Vandenberg. Mostly launched by SpaceX, part of Elon Musk’s extraordinary portfolio of companies, which seem to be hauling the future into the present, inspiring both awe and fear. On a Sunday in mid-November, a group of business journalists from New Zealand gathered at a Hilton Garden Inn in Lompoc, preparing to watch a rocket head skyward.

We met with a pair of engineers from SpaceX for dinner, before heading towards the nearby base. Unlike SpaceX’s hyper-communicative owner, its staff were not permitted to be quoted on record. But nothing they said contradicted the public image of SpaceX as an extraordinarily intense work culture, with every employee drilled on the fact the ultimate mission is Mars.

We drove to to a location on Renwick Ave, a pot-holed dirt road, around four miles from the Vandenberg Space Force Base. We weren’t alone – the road was dotted with other rocket spotters, most of them intrigued by a large gang of Antipodeans who’d shown up with beer and camp chairs for the evening. The launches take place in a window of a few hours, this one opening around 9.45pm and running through 1am. The previous night’s overnight low was near zero, and it was single digits as we shivered and waited to see whether the launch would go ahead.

The wait, and the weight

This was by no means certain. A previous One NZ trip to Cape Canaveral, on the other side of this vast country, returned without ever achieving lift-off. We travelled on the proviso that the launch was no sure thing, and gazed hopefully towards a spectral glow on the horizon where SpaceX’s Falcon9 rocket stood ready for launch.

Still, signs were promising. The SpaceX staff had eyes on a livestream from the base, and numbers on that swelled from a few thousand to more than 50,000 as the allotted time neared. The air was crisp, the sky clear with only a breath of wind. Maybe this was really going to happen?

Then it did. Without warning, the sky lit up with spectacular, searing brightness, accompanied by a deep, sustained roar of unimaginable fury. It was impossible not to be moved by the moment – this sense that humans were once again sending cargo from earth to space. It might now be routine, but something about the audacity of the act, and the force required to achieve it, cannot help but induce a very specific feeling from those watching. True awe.

The rocket arced across the sky, more slowly than I’d expected. After heading skyward, it turned to blaze almost horizontally across the night sky. At that point it left a ring of smoke drifting, lit up by a luminous moon. The rocket kept going, disappearing off into the atmosphere, until it became indistinguishable from the stars. At some point it delivered its payload – 20 Starlink satellites, joining thousands already in the atmosphere – along with 13 direct-to-cell satellites. 

Networks, then, now and into the future

There are far fewer of these in orbit – but their implications are profound, and the reason One NZ flew us the US. The following day, we got the fine detail, a presentation that laid out the present and Starlink satellite-enabled future of mobile networks, delivered by One NZ’s networks head Thaigen Govender. 

He was born to Indian parents under South African apartheid, and experienced the glory days of building out the first mobile networks that brought connection to rural Africa. Now he’s working with far more sophisticated equipment, with success measured in capacity, latency and speed. For more than two hours he talked about this industrial technology, which few of us contemplate but nonetheless provides the infrastructure upon which our society and economy increasingly rests.

Govender started by explaining how conventional cell coverage works now, and how One NZ’s own part of it is changing. After spreading across our main population centres, it increasingly has turned towards interiors, threading through large developments, and leading coverage through Auckland’s City Rail Link, ensuring all cell providers will avoid the kind of blackouts that define London’s underground rail. 

It’s an intricately made network, with more than 2,400 sites and 11,000km of fibre, but even in this era of 5G conspiracy theorist vandalism, animals remain its greatest threat – Govender calls the fence the most important part of a location. The network’s limits and vulnerabilities are something Govender thinks a lot about, and ultimately why we’re here – a partnership with SpaceX that will radically alter where the network ends. He’s a huge admirer of the company, and the way it builds. “You’re pushing the limits of physics. With SpaceX, their philosophy is to own their entire value chain.,” he says.

The rationale for rockets

Its limits are largely defined by geography. One NZ’s network claims to reach 99% of New Zealanders. But anyone who lives remotely or has travelled off the beaten track knows the 40% of our land mass that is beyond coverage is vast. Beyond the whenua lies the moana, our territorial waters – 12 nautical miles with even far patchier coverage. 

This is where Starlink comes in, starting with texting. As of now, the One NZ team has tested and proved capability. It’s slower than we typically expect, with a message taking as long as two minutes to send. As with many Elon Musk productions, it’s not uncomplicated – when we travelled, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had yet to formally approve it for deployment, in part due to lawsuits claiming interference by competing US telcos. 

That changed last Thursday. SpaceX’s head of satellite Ben Longmier announced on X (where else?) that its direct-to-cell service had received the long-awaited FCC approval. “This gets us one step closer to launching the One NZ satellite text service,” says Nicky Preston, One NZ’s head of corporate affairs. “It opens the door for our satellite-to-mobile service in Aotearoa once field testing is complete.” It was the last major regulatory barrier. The technical challenges are surmounted – Starlink has all the satellites it needs in the sky. All that remains now is final testing – and turning it on.

What will that mean for Aotearoa? The example Govender cites is Cyclone Gabrielle. It was a layered tragedy, but also proof our communications infrastructure can be highly vulnerable to climate change-related weather events. Slips cut cables, the power went out for large chunks of the region, and even when emergency generators were procured, they were sometimes stolen. 

To Govender’s thinking, having access to a network that cannot be impacted by events on the ground is a huge breakthrough in a world that is becoming ever more prone to extreme weather. It doesn’t end there – while SMS is the initial use case, they anticipate that by some time in 2025 it will carry basic data and voice too, an enormous, likely life-saving step change to our emergency preparedness. One NZ’s Preston confirmed that emergencies will not be limited by your provider – it has committed to opening the network to Spark and 2 Degrees for 111 calls, and is working on a provider-neutral emergency alerts.

A different kind of connection

Of course, that’s not the only reason One NZ is partnering with SpaceX. The company’s name changed just a couple of years ago, but before that One NZ was known as Vodafone – and might more accurately have been known as #2 NZ. It was something like the TV3 of telcos  to Spark’s TVNZ – a spirited, energetic challenger to the dominant, state-founded incumbent. One that despite its best efforts, could never quite close the gap. 

Suddenly, though, Spark feels vulnerable in its position as market leader, for perhaps the first time in its existence. It has spent a decade boldly venturing into related markets – streaming TV, streaming sports, IoT, data centres, gaming and generative AI – some of which it has shut down, and it cannot necessarily point to definitive winners, beyond its award-winning budget brand Skinny. This has its share price down 40% in 2024, and its competition perked up. 2 Degrees recently won a big schools contract and vastly narrowed its losses, but it’s One NZ that presents as Spark’s biggest challenger.

The company is led by a former Spark exec named Jason Paris, and, by contrast, has stuck firmly to its core business. One NZ shut down its acclaimed Vodafone TV project, and has bet the house on a simple strategy: be the best at being a telco. A survey by Accenture’s Umlaut (funded by One NZ) gives it reason to believe it’s winning there – but that only gets you so far. 

For most customers, most of the time, all three of our major providers provide an excellent service at a reasonable price. The SpaceX satellites promise something rare and to an extent unknowable without testing it in a live market: how much of an edge is it to have coverage that never ends?

The SpaceX tie-up has the potential to be a profound differentiator. As of now the telcos compete on services, or roaming. Spark bundles you Spotify on some plans; 2 Degrees lets you take your business plan to Australia. This is very different – a step change in the usability of your device. One NZ will not be charging extra for it, simply making it available on higher-priced plans. Fonterra is a Spark customer – could having rural connectivity pry it away? That’s the question One NZ is seeking to answer.

Spark and 2 Degrees aren’t ignoring this threat. Each has partnered with Lynk, another satellite cell service provider, and Spark tested SMS through its service last year. However, the service is connected to its existing network of cell towers, and Lynk has just four satellites to SpaceX’s 300-plus equivalents. For better or worse, the brute strength of SpaceX’s financial lead might prove insurmountable. And while in the US, SpaceX’s founder Musk has promised it will be available to all carriers after its first year, New Zealand is a smaller market, and One NZ has a different deal.

Govender could not reveal its duration, but did not explicitly deny a right of renewal. It sets up huge stakes – if One NZ is right about how meaningful total coverage is to businesses and some individuals, it could maintain this competitive advantage for as long as SpaceX maintains its lead. 

That’s not uncomplicated – SpaceX is also a competitor, selling direct broadband connections, predominantly to remote customers. But it’s unlikely a satellite cell service could ever reach the kind of quality of terrestrial networks, as heading indoors gets complicated. (This is the basis of Commerce Commission charges of misrepresentation around One NZ’s advertising, that its cell coverage requires line of sight to the sky. One NZ will vigorously defend such charges, it says.)

Robots and rockets, everywhere

A week in California can feel like you’re transported forward into the near future – one that is coming whether we like it or not. Increasingly Californian companies control large chunks of the current and future global economy, a very challenging economic and geopolitical reality. Despite Musk’s hard Republican jag, physically expressed in his companies’ move towards Texas, most of his key businesses were founded in California and retain strong presences on the ground there.

We visited SpaceX’s headquarters, on Crenshaw Boulevard. As we pulled up a giant space module, shrouded in tarpaulin, was slowly emerging from a side gate. A Falcon 9 rocket, just like the one we saw launch days earlier, stands tall on one corner. Back at the hotel, a small robot makes deliveries to your room. In San Francisco I took two eerie rides in Waymo’s driverless rideshare, with ambient music and soothing AI-generated voices talking you through the process. The bleeding edge of technology is part of life here. 

New Zealand can feel very remote from the rest of the world, and our recessionary economy seemingly uncoupled from the growth revving the giant US engine. Yet what’s happening here is coming everywhere over time. The SpaceX satellites are up there, bringing unique challenges and opportunities to our economy and society. A week here made it clear that California’s present is our near-future – one way or another, our world will be changed by what happens in this vast, complex state. One NZ has placed a big bet that these rockets might propel it forward too.

The author travelled to the United States courtesy of One NZ