Telco One NZ getting some grief from Kiwis over Elon Musk link

Wednesday, 26 February 2025

There are signs the Donald Trump-Elon Musk double act may be prompting some Kiwis to think about where they spend their money.

A “small number” of customers have contacted One NZ to object to its ties with Elon Musk-owned Starlink, the telco says.

Starlink provides a satellite broadband service that is used around the world, including by 37,000 consumers and businesses in New Zealand, and also the Ukrainian military.

However, Reuters reported on Monday that US negotiators had said Ukraine’s access to Starlink could be cut off if the country didn’t agree to surrender much of its mineral wealth to the US.

A train of SpaceX starlink satellites passes overhead.

One NZ doesn’t sell Starlink’s broadband service, but has partnered with its parent company SpaceX to become the first telco in the world to offer a service that lets customers send and receive texts via satellite as if they were connected to a normal cellphone tower.

One NZ spokesperson Nicky Preston said Musk “can be polarising”.

“We are hearing from a small number of customers they are concerned about our partnership with one of his companies.”

But she said it was undeniable Musk had created some incredible technology solutions.

Its satellite text service brought “immense safety and productivity benefits” to New Zealanders as a back-up to traditional mobile networks, she said.

MBIE has noted SpaceX’s Starlink is unlikely to have a near monopoly over satellite-based broadband forever.

SpaceX was currently the only company capable of delivering a satellite-to-mobile service at scale and — unlike Starlink’s broadband service — that relied on locally owned radio spectrum, she noted.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment wouldn’t comment directly on whether it had prepared any advice on the risk that threats could ever be made to withdraw Starlink coverage here.

But general manager of communications infrastructure James Hartley said it was “aware of the risks of service withdrawal around any international service providers”.

“New Zealand has a wide range of telecommunications service providers including fixed-line and wireless network operators,” Hartley said.

“We welcome competition in our telecommunications market and look forward to having more diversity in satellite service provision in the future, for example from Amazon Kuiper.”

Project Kuiper is an initiative by Amazon that aims to rival Starlink by offering broadband through an alternative constellation of 3236 satellites, the first of which are due to be launched from Florida in the next few weeks.

Another Musk-led business, Tesla, may be experiencing local fall out from his radical activism in the United States, though a car industry expert said it was too soon to judge.

Reports suggest Tesla sales in Europe have been hit hard by political developments in the US. New registrations of Tesla cars fell 60% in Germany in January, for example, despite an overall 54% rise in EV sales there.

Only 52 Teslas were registered in New Zealand in January, according to market statistics publisher evdb.nz.

That is down from a monthly average of 118 last year.

However, Tesla registrations have been sliding in New Zealand since peaking at an average of nearly 600 a month in 2022, with imports of rival Chinese EVs on the rise.

Automedia editor Richard Edwards said was too soon to read much into Tesla’s latest registration figures.

The January number was “real” but it was pretty much impossible to extract any trend, given Tesla had announced the launch of a new model Y vehicle in April and buyers might be holding off for that, he said.

“The real ‘tell’ is going to be what happens when the new model arrives but, even then, we're in a pretty saturated market at the moment.

“There are people saying ‘I won't deal with them now, I'm selling my car back’, but who knows what's real versus who’s simply a loud mouth on a website who has no intention of buying a vehicle.”