Kia ora all Starlink-curious,
So I had a drive-by past starlink.com here tonight and noticed something
weird: Starlink has changed its pricing in NZ in a way that may be of
interest.
If you buy a Starlink hardware kit off their website and you order it
for an urban address (that appears to be anything in our cities that are
bigger than about Hamilton and their immediate lifestyle block belts),
it's $729 for the hardware (Dishy kit). If you order it for a rural
address (anywhere else), it's $199 only. Yes, that's $199 vs. $729! In
NZ dollars. Previous pricing was a flat $520 and $1040 was the nominal
price:
https://www.starlink.com/
I'm not sure that is even legal in NZ to discriminate by price based on
where your product will be used, but I'm no expert on this.
Now the interesting bit is that you can also get the kit from local
retail chain Noel Leeming, where it is $199 no matter your address, but
you need to activate the Starlink kit when you get home and set it up:
https://www.noelleeming.co.nz/p/starlink-standard-kit/N216204.html
That begs the question as to whether Starlink will charge consumers in
urban areas an extra $530 upon activation and, if so, whether that is
clear to the customers when they buy the unit at Noel Leeming. It
mentions nothing to that effect on their website.
The most likely explanation for the differential is that there are now
more urbanites per area with Starlink, but not as many genuinely rural
users as they'd like. (Thinking of tech-aficionados wanting to give it a
spin and probably a significant number of gullibles thinking it was
going to do better than their fibre connection after they got the
infamous leaflet drops here). So it looks as if Starlink are trying to
rebalance this - a nice way of validating the observation that user
density on the ground matters.
Also more reports coming through of people using Starlink in roaming
mode in truly remote locations - had a report from Tarawa in Kiribati
tonight, and another last week of users in NZ's Chatham Islands. My PhD
student, who hails from Tarawa, was sent a direct marketing e-mail
offering him roaming service there. So clearly at least some of the
lasers are now working, but pricing and service description warning of
frequent outages are clearly aimed at keeping customer numbers in check
for now. My reading into this is that they have the lasers operating
that communicate within the orbital plane, but are yet to commission the
cross-plane ones.
Planning a trip with my student to a (Starlink-)remote location south of
here in a fortnight to see how being away from a gateway location
impacts on performance.
Ulrich
--
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Dr. Ulrich Speidel
School of Computer Science
Room 303S.594 (City Campus)
The University of Auckland
[email protected]
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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