[Starlink] Starlink in NZ

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

Some more interesting insights, three days ago: Last week, Starlink 
introduced differential pricing for the hardware: An arm and a leg in 
the three big cities - NZ$729 - and an apple and an egg - NZ$199 - in 
"select areas of rural NZ" which declared a number of budding 
metropolises here as "rural". Noel Leeming's price dropped to NZ$199, 
however the kits then disappeared from their website altogether a day or 
two later, just when we'd been scratching our head as to whether it was 
even legal to price a hardware item based on customer location here. The 
kits disappeared entirely - they didn't just show as out of stock. So 
the other day, I popped into a country town store of Noel Leeming's, the 
sole electronics chain that sold Starlink kits here, where a helpful 
shop assistant showed me that they had numerous units on back order for 
customers, and had in fact a total of 5000 units on order from SpaceX. 
The shop assistant told me that their branch alone had sold hundreds. So 
with them having around 75 stores around the country, we're probably 
looking at a few 10,000 users here, maybe into the low 100,000 - my best 
guesstimate.

The difference in price is a clear indication of Starlink trying to 
manage user density, as is an offer we received the other day of 50 GB 
of priority "mobile and ocean" data (where have we seen this before?).

-- 
****************************************************************
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/
****************************************************************