[Starlink] Re: Starlink D2D observation - fwiw

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

Would love to, but the emergency is over and I've been out of the area 
for a few days now.

Finding a sufficiently remote area near Auckland for D2C/D2D test is 
kind of difficult. Here is what 4G coverage looks like around here:

The white spots on the map are near inaccessible - either off limits to 
the public, on private land, or pretty hard to get to. Plus some I know 
actually have coverage even though the map suggests otherwise, e.g. the 
coast south of Piha. Where I was last week, uncovered spots are easier 
to find - the landscape there has few cell sites but a lot of deep gorges.

On 26/02/2026 4:54 pm, J Pan wrote:
> oh, take care. you could help us do some more in-depth tests on dtc as
> well. safety first!
> --
> J Pan, UVic CSc, ECS566, 250-472-5796 (NO VM),Pan@UVic.CA, Web.UVic.CA/~pan
>
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 7:43 PM Ulrich Speidel via Starlink
> <starlink@lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
>> Last week, I found myself driving into a disaster area - I was on leave
>> and the southern North Island of NZ got hit by the worst weather in
>> three years (since Cyclone Gabrielle, basically). We were booked to stay
>> for a few nights at a Department of Conservation (DOC) lodge in a remote
>> valley north of Palmerston North.
>>
>> Access roads to the area are all precarious - potential for slips,
>> flooding, washouts, bridge damage are ubiquitous there.
>>
>> My initial fears that we might have to flee the place overnight were
>> assuaged the moment I saw that the lodge was well above river level. To
>> our surprise, there was 4G terrestrial coverage also. The lodge has
>> mains power, too. On site: My wife, me, a Kiwi tramper, and two French
>> cyclists.
>>
>> Forecast was for 140-180 mm (~6-7 inches) of rain overnight. So we
>> weren't overly surprised to find that the lodge had no power when we
>> woke up in the morning. We also soon found out that the 4G coverage had
>> gone. We had a mains+battery-operated fridge for food with us and a bit
>> of battery lighting, and there was a woodfire for warmth and cooking,
>> alas it initially appeared that we would have no water - the rainwater
>> tanks only release their treasure via pump... until we discovered a
>> hidden tap later in the day.
>>
>> After breakfast, the local farmer from up the road turned up to let us
>> know that all roads out were blocked. He is also a radio ham and had
>> limited UHF comms out. At that point, I discovered that my phone now
>> showed One NZ SpaceX as the network - even though I don't have a
>> compatible plan. So it appears that One NZ turned the service on in the
>> disaster area (which is very sparsely populated).
>>
>> The service appeared to be text only (no WhatsApp or anything IP-based
>> worked). My phone (Samsung A56) was the only one of five in the lodge
>> that worked with the service, similarly, among three phones in the
>> farmer's household, only one - a recent iPhone - worked. Sending a text
>> message took around a minute each. I only sent a few - to our emergency
>> contact, a friend who we'd said we'd go visit the next day, and one on
>> behalf of one of the other lodge guests. So it's a small data set.
>>
>> As expected, coverage was much better outdoors, although it seemed to
>> occasionally manage to pick up the network through a window as well.
>> Sending text from indoors didn't work for me at all. But having that
>> option was nice.
>>
>> One road opened again the next morning, and the power came back on later
>> that day, along with the 4G coverage.
>>
>> --
>> ****************************************************************
>> 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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-- 
****************************************************************
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/
****************************************************************