[Starlink] Weird Starlink pricing in NZ (and what this tells us)

[Ulrich Speidel <u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz>]

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
u.speidel@auckland.ac.nz
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~ulrich/
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