Kiwis who want Starlink have formerly only had the option to buy hardware online, with DIY setup - although something of a cottage industry of unofficial installers has sprung up as more than 10,000 people took a leap of faith and bought the service.
Noel Leeming is offering a Starlink satellite dish and router for $520 - or half the usual price. Those who buy directly online from Starlink will get the same deal into the New Year.
Starlink costs $159 a month for unlimited data and speeds comparable with fixed-wireless and entry-level UFB fibre plans.
Satellite broadband has traditionally had a lousy rap for tight data limits low speeds and high latency - or the lag you can get with a two-way connection to a geosynchronous satellite orbiting some 36,000km above the Earth.
Starlink gets around the lag problem with a network of thousands of low-Earth orbiting satellites swarming about 600km above.
The Herald has talked to numerous early Starlink adopters, who have been broadly positive (see their work-from-home-stories, plus a couple of gotchas, here).
Starlink won’t give indicative speeds for the consumer version. For its business service, which requires a higher-gain, $4200 satellite dish and costs $840 per month, it promises 350 megabits per second, or on a par with most UFB fibre.
We know from FCC filings in the US that Starlink, a division of the Musk-owned SpaceX, is growing fast.
In February, it said it had more than 250,000 users worldwide. By June, that number had grown to 400,000. By October, it was more than half a million.
Starlink has built a network of six ground stations in New Zealand in partnership with Cello and Vocus NZ (which merged operations with 2degrees mid-year).
Most pundits have seen Starlink as a good solution for remote rural areas.
And the Government recently said Starlink, at least on paper, could tender for a new grant scheme that provides $2000 to install broadband at a property out of reach of the public-private Rural Broadband Initiative.
But the firm - which has only offered service, gradually ramping up, over the past 24 months - has targetted all parts of New Zealand with a marketing campaign that has been surprisingly old-school, with leaflet drops in urban letterboxes, print ads in newspapers and airport billboards.
Its rise has started to draw the attention of local telco players, and more so because Starlink pays only a token amount for its groundstation licenses, and has not joined dispute resolution or other regulatory schemes wrangled by the Commerce Commission.
Vodafone NZ said in its submission: “Currently, satellite broadband providers are effectively using radio spectrum for free”.
The telco wanted “symmetric regulation” - which could be read as: If we’re going to be whacked with huge fees for our spectrum, then Elon’s company should be too”.
In its own submission, SpaceX said Starlink’s ground station antenna should be exempt from licensing requirements, “To ensure that consumers - especially those in the most rural and remote areas of New Zealand - reap the benefits of this new cutting-edge technology”.
