{"id":469426,"date":"2026-06-10T02:23:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T02:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/469426\/"},"modified":"2026-06-10T02:23:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T02:23:09","slug":"revealed-the-us-satellite-broadband-provider-behind-the-mystery-auckland-domes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/469426\/","title":{"rendered":"Revealed: The US satellite broadband provider behind the \u2018mystery\u2019 Auckland domes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AnAn antenna at the Starlink ground station at Puwera. Photo \/ Northern Advocate<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"StarlinkStarlink 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.<\/p>\n

In contrast, they look nothing like the dishes for an Amazon ground station, an example of which is pictured below.<\/p>\n

\"AnAn Amazon Leo ground station. Photo \/ Amazon<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe site near Marton in Manawat\u016b, where 2degrees is building a satellite station for newcomer AST SpaceMobile. Photo \/ 2degrees<\/p>\n

The third contender is AST SpaceMobile. 2degrees has already publicly said that the location of the ground station it\u2019s building for the US firm is Marton in Manawat\u016b.<\/p>\n

AST SpaceMobile\u2019s ground stations have a similar naked-dish look to Amazon\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Ground stations\u2019 place in the puzzle<\/p>\n

Your residential or business Starlink dish beams data up to a satellite passing overhead. <\/p>\n

That satellite then instantly relays the signal down to one of these ground stations, which is directly connected to New Zealand\u2019s terrestrial fibre optic cable to fetch your data.<\/p>\n

The satellite players<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Starlink\u2019s swarm of low-Earth-orbit satellites \u2013 now numbering around 10,000 \u2013 revolutionised the market with a relatively cheap, uncapped service. <\/p>\n

The network, fully owned by Elon Musk\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"ASTAST 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<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s end.<\/p>\n

One NZ and Spark have satellite-to-mobile partnerships with Starlink. All three telcos are resellers for the business-grade version of Musk\u2019s service.<\/p>\n

Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald\u2019s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An antenna at the Starlink ground station at Puwera. Photo \/ Northern Advocate The dishes going up in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":469427,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[51,1558,4057,3896,674,138,1853,12784,60707,305,31037,20829,237441,8732,111,139,69,4410,12860,66146,4029,16487,13655,4758,8475,223,3040,237440],"class_list":["post-469426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-auckland","tag-been","tag-behind","tag-broadband","tag-building","tag-business","tag-central","tag-college","tag-domes","tag-have","tag-hill","tag-locals","tag-lowrise","tag-mystery","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-provider","tag-revealed","tag-roof","tag-satellite","tag-shape","tag-station","tag-taking","tag-thats","tag-the","tag-us","tag-vexed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469426\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/469427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}