One NZ is making Starlink’s satellite services available on cellphones next year – good news for those living in mobile black spots, but not everybody is celebrating.

Earlier this week, One NZ (formerly Vodafone) announced a deal with Starlink that would allow service users total mobile coverage, with no black spots in the country. The service won’t be available until late next year, as most of Starlink’s current satellites don’t have the ability to connect to cellphones. The service will initially allow text messages to be sent via satellite, then voice messages and data as capacity increases.

Currently, Starlink is mainly used by people in rural areas not covered by fibre broadband. Users need a satellite dish and modem set-up which costs $1049, but has recently been on sale for $199 in rural areas and $799 in urban areas. In addition to the set-up cost, Starlink internet costs $159 per month. However, the One NZ announcement means that phones will be directly communicating with satellites, rather than through a focused and powered satellite disc. 

Ulrich Speidel, a senior lecturer in computer science at Auckland University, told The Spinoff that the announcement will make Starlink services much more widely available in New Zealand, beyond the several thousand people already paying for Starlink internet. That said, consumers needed to manage their expectations. “You’re not going to be able to stream Netflix while you’re tramping – it’s not going to be the same speeds you get in central Auckland,” he says. He explains that the technology will only work if you’re outside, as roofs and walls will be liable to block most of the satellite’s signal from five hundred kilometres away. 

That said, there are some obvious use cases for satellite signals, highlighted in the recent floods caused by Cyclone Gabrielle, where Starlink units helped cut-off communities make contact. “The satellite and terrestrial networks are a good complement to each other,” says Speidel. “When the terrestrial network is down, the satellite is a back-up.” While the satellite network provided through One NZ will only have capacity for text messages initially, Speidel points out that when needed – a crash on a rural road, telling your partner when you’ll be home for dinner from the black spot of Transmission Gully – the service could be very useful. 

While the network will be available everywhere, people living in areas without coverage, or who travel to areas without coverage, stand to benefit the most. Speidel emphasises that a satellite network is not a replacement for standard cell phone towers. “The satellites are hundreds of kilometres away [while]  cell phone towers are usually just a few kilometres away,” he says. “The signal strength [from the satellite] will always be much weaker.” 

Starlink, part of Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, uses thousands of low-earth satellites, linked in constellations. Because these satellites are not “geostationary” – that is, orbiting above a permanent spot about the earth – they appear as strings of light moving through the sky at nighttime, rising and setting like the sun. Thousands of satellites are required for total coverage, because there needs to be a satellite roughly above you at all times. The satellite cellphone network will take time to implement, as not all of the satellites currently in orbit have the capacity to communicate with cellphones. 

The satellites are launched from SpaceX rockets, and last five to eight years, meaning the network has high maintenance costs as the satellites need to be regularly replaced. While speeds for terrestrial telecommunications can be improved by laying more undersea fibre-optic cables, improvements in satellite internet require more satellites – so those chains of Starlink constellations could become a more common sight. 

Mobile coverage via satellite is already available in some regions, with the Rural Connectivity Group – a partnership between Crown Infrastructure Partners, One NZ, Spark and 2Degrees – reaching “black spot areas” by using towers connected to a geostationary satellite before linking into the main grid. The technology has been used to provide cell coverage in remote areas like the Chatham Islands and Fiordland. 

However, Speidel notes that the Starlink deal is different, as phones will be directly connecting to the satellites, rather than connecting through a tower. “A tower can talk to the satellite with much more power than your phone with its puny little battery.” This means that the coverage provided by Starlink to cellphones will be slow, so for now the RCG network is still essential for many areas not covered by cell service. When reached for comment by The Spinoff, a spokesperson for the Rural Connectivity Group said that the organisation was in the early stage of evaluating how the One NZ announcement might impact their services and agreement with the three network providers.

Rural internet providers have raised concerns about Starlink disrupting markets that they’ve invested heavily in. At the moment, Starlink pays licences to use the radio spectrum for each of its six ground units throughout New Zealand, for a total of about $10,000 a year. Meanwhile, Spark, One NZ and 2degrees paid $259m together for the 4G network, and are spending millions more on making 5G available in Aotearoa. Starlink has 250,000 customers and SpaceX makes hundreds of million dollars in revenue, and continues to grow, so the company is hardly hurting for cash (unless it’s all keeping Twitter afloat?).

Starlink has not invested in New Zealand’s telecommunications infrastructure to the same degree, but is still profiting from doing business here – and while details of the One NZ deal have not been made clear it will certainly have been an expensive one for the New Zealand company. Mike Smith, who chairs the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, a group of small ISPs across the motu, told the Herald that this seems unfair. 

Another group with concerns about Starlink are astronomers, who’ve criticised the way the low-earth satellites can interfere with their research. Instead of gathering high-resolution images of deep space, their telescope images are marked with stripes of white from Starlink satellites.  

The worries of astronomers and other telecommunications companies are a reminder of how invisible things, like radio frequencies and the gravitational pull of earth which allows objects to orbit, can become the domain of private companies. For now, though, Starlink will keep launching satellites, hunks of metal and plastic rotating above us, soon to relay text messages. Keep watching space, Speidel says – Starlink is an early mover, but Musk isn’t the only billionaire hoping to profit from internet in the sky. 

It’s one of the oldest social networking sites, predating Facebook, Twitter, even MySpace. And it will probably outlive all of them.

Rob Campbell was a man with an opinion after the National Party announced its alternative to the Three Waters policy at the end of February. A few days later he was a man without not one but two high-profile jobs. Why? The chair of Te Whatu Ora and the Environmental Protection Authority simply couldn’t resist the temptation to post. Specifically, he couldn’t resist the temptation to post on LinkedIn. 

The Campbell LinkedIn saga was remarkable not for the efficiency with which he was stripped of his government posts, the chutzpah with which he denied that his posts violated the tenets of the Public Service Commission’s code of conduct, or how familiar a number of breathless politics watchers promptly became with said code of conduct. The biggest thing the Campbell saga revealed was the way Linked in is used today, and how one of our oldest and possibly most boring social media platforms is more relevant than ever. 

LinkedIn is one of the original social media platforms – founded in 2002, it predates Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, as well as largely abandoned platforms like Bebo and MySpace. Now owned by Microsoft, its point of distinction has always been a focus on the professional: you construct your profile like a CV, listing where you’ve worked and been educated. The main newsfeed is similar in look and function to Facebook, but posts consist of news about people moving jobs, leaving jobs, or succeeding at jobs. It’s literally all work and no play.

Like any other social media platform, LinkedIn has its own linguistic conventions and habits – to outsiders, the platform is defined by an excess of what some have called “cringe”, extreme examples of which are documented by the Reddit community r/LinkedInLunatics. The LinkedIn algorithm particularly favours a form of writing dubbed “broetry”, where quasi-inspirational stories and banal anecdotes are spaced out in single sentences over multiple lines, presumably to boost engagement.

“There’s definitely a LinkedIn formula,” says Josie Adams, a former Spinoff staff writer who now works as a content writer for a technology company. Part of her role is to post on behalf of her company’s founders on LinkedIn, as well as managing the company’s page. This has only increased her cynicism. “I’ve never seen a good LinkedIn post,” she says. 

Despite this, Adams admits that being active on LinkedIn led directly to her current job. She’s followed exactly the advice of Massey digital marketing lecturer Phoebe Fletcher, who recommends that each of her students makes a LinkedIn account.

“LinkedIn is a way to network with people in your field without having to pay thousands of dollars to go to a conference,” Fletcher says. “We live in a world that is online – it’s important to connect!” To translate that into LinkedIn speak: your network is your net worth. 

But that networking can’t be achieved merely with insipid items of professional news. It’s 2023, and LinkedIn’s active user base – Campbell among them – has realised that the platform is yet another way you can tell people about your ideas. That’s incredibly valuable, says Jehan Casinader. The writer and journalist now has 18,000 followers on LinkedIn – enough that he gets recognised on the street for his posts. He started taking LinkedIn seriously when he released a book about his experience with depression. He wanted to do speaking and event facilitation, and he used LinkedIn to promote himself, writing short pieces with photos about everything from how to talk to a friend about mental health to what he learned by being able to fix his own car tire. 

“I didn’t have any deep connections in the corporate world,” he says. He’s now spoken at numerous major organisations and conferences. “You can tell a good story on [LinkedIn], just like anywhere else.” 

Casinader says popular LinkedIn posts are often informative or clearly communicated ideas, an example of the social media platform letting “cream rising to the top”. Just like a column or a piece to camera, he works on his craft: each post of a few hundred words takes an hour or two of close attention – and he thinks that this is why his LinkedIn statuses have resonated with thousands of people. It’s a far cry from the “toxic cesspool of negativity” that is Twitter. “People are interested in good stories, in engaging with the stuff you’re grappling with,” he says; if you’re going to be making connections on the internet, Casinader thinks LinkedIn is a more productive place to do it than any other social media platform. 

LinkedIn’s reputation for being positive is certainly helped by another of its features: the absence of any “sad” reaction button – as if the platform doesn’t expect users to feel any negative emotions. “It should be more negative, and it should be funnier,” says Adams, who experiments with humorous writing on LinkedIn herself (with, admittedly, a much lower follower count than Casinader’s sincerity has achieved). 

But maybe the business skew of LinkedIn is enough to keep the platform positive. “LinkedIn isn’t very political,” says Fletcher. “It often comes up when people Google you, and [if you’re job hunting] you want to show that professional side.”

Of course, posting on LinkedIn is a performance of professionalism – just like posting on Twitter is a performance of pithy irony and posting on Instagram is a performance of the aesthetic considerations of your life. But while the self you present to your LinkedIn followers might seem totally alien to the self you present to your Tumblr followers, some self-regulation and compartmentalising has always been part of the human experience, Fletcher suggests. 

“People make decisions all the time about what to disclose, what audience they’re speaking to,” she says. The difference is that in being, explicitly, a platform for people with jobs, the audience that people are imagining is potential future employers. On LinkedIn, you’re always showing the best parts of yourself, as if you’re in a job interview. 

The inclination towards “professionalism”, whatever that means, is perhaps part of the reason Rob Campbell’s post made such a splash – we rarely hear of pearl clutching about the latest trend on LinkedIn, unlike the rabid attention often given to teenagers on TikTok. Given that many people use LinkedIn to look for work, both users and companies are incentivised to show only the cleanest, most productive versions of themselves. The algorithm is more interested in this performance of productive labour than anything more outrageous. Or maybe it’s because the people who excel on LinkedIn tend to have other markers of power and wealth – there’s no headline in a succeeding business talking up its continued success on LinkedIn.

With all its idiosyncrasies, LinkedIn has found a way to endure. It’s already outlasted several major social networks, and it might outlast more. It’s got Jehan Casinader’s storytelling. It’s got Josie Adams’s shitposts. It’s got Phoebe Fletcher’s former digital marketing students helming corporate accounts. It’s got the occasional political scandal, and chances are it has your nicest headshot and tidily conveyed work history, too. All these work to keep LinkedIn around. It’s also, at the very least, one social media platform it’s OK to use at work.