Revealed: The US satellite broadband provider behind the ‘mystery’ Auckland domes

An antenna at the Starlink ground station at Puwera. Photo / Northern Advocate

The dishes going up in central Auckland look exactly like the Starlink dishes already installed at six locations around New Zealand by Vocus NZ and Cello, with another shortly to be added in Canterbury.

Starlink already has six ground stations in New Zealand, three of them constructed by Vocus NZ (now part of 2degrees), with a seventh on the way in Canterbury and the yet-to-be-confirmed Auckland build.

In contrast, they look nothing like the dishes for an Amazon ground station, an example of which is pictured below.

An Amazon Leo ground station. Photo / Amazon

Additionally, we know from Linz records that Amazon Leo (owned by Amazon, the giant retailer and data centre operator) got permission to buy a 500sq m block of land, at an undisclosed location, for $480,000, for the purpose of a ground station.

That’s not an Auckland CBD price. (43 College Hill is a 2632sq m site, owned by a property fund, with a rateable value of $21.5 million.) Amazon Leo only sought permission for one location.

The site near Marton in Manawatū, where 2degrees is building a satellite station for newcomer AST SpaceMobile. Photo / 2degrees

The third contender is AST SpaceMobile. 2degrees has already publicly said that the location of the ground station it’s building for the US firm is Marton in Manawatū.

AST SpaceMobile’s ground stations have a similar naked-dish look to Amazon’s.

Ground stations’ place in the puzzle

Your residential or business Starlink dish beams data up to a satellite passing overhead.

That satellite then instantly relays the signal down to one of these ground stations, which is directly connected to New Zealand’s terrestrial fibre optic cable to fetch your data.

The satellite players

Satellite broadband was historically delivered via large, geostationary satellites. It was good for some remote rural customers, but was slow and expensive, with tight data caps.

Starlink’s swarm of low-Earth-orbit satellites – now numbering around 10,000 – revolutionised the market with a relatively cheap, uncapped service.

The network, fully owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, now has 10 million customers around the world, including 53,000 in New Zealand (mostly in rural areas) who generated it more than $100 million in revenue from NZ last year.

AST SpaceMobile has five satellites in orbit. Each has a large transmission footprint, in contrast to the thousands in Starlink’s thousands of low-Earth-orbit swarm. Render / AST

Starlink competitor Amazon Leo, which follows a similar low-orbit swarm model, is expected to launch service for 300,000 Australians later this year, with a New Zealand launch to follow at an unspecified date.

AST SpaceMobile, backed by Vodafone, Samsung, Google and others, follows a different model, with a handful of satellites with tennis court-sized arrays. 2degrees is expected to offer a satellite-to-mobile service via AST by year’s end.

One NZ and Spark have satellite-to-mobile partnerships with Starlink. All three telcos are resellers for the business-grade version of Musk’s service.

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.