Starlink has quickly become the hero – and potential hazard – of rural broadband in New Zealand. 

In a few short years, Elon Musk’s low-Earth orbit satellite service has gone from curiosity to default option for many farms, small towns and remote communities that never made it onto the fibre map. It’s racked up 58,000 subscribers and generated around $100 million in revenue last year, delivering broadband access via satellite with a self-install version that has amassed many raving fans.

In a country where the “last 5–10%” of connections have always been the hardest and most expensive, Starlink looks like the magic bullet.

But in the latest episode of The Business of Tech podcast, Alex Stewart – the 21-year-old founder of Greater Wellington wireless ISP WombatNET – suggests we risk ceding sovereignty to one or two US companies when it comes to rural connectivity.

Stewart’s company is one of dozens of small, regional wireless internet providers that have spent the past decade building towers, stitching together backhaul and hand-holding customers who were too far from the cabinet, tower or fibre trench to interest the big players. Now, those same operators are watching customers churn to Starlink at a rapid clip, undermining the economics of infrastructure that taxpayers helped fund.

Too much of a good thing?

Stewart argues this isn’t just a competitive problem. It’s also a resilience problem. In the interview, he explains how some rural communities now rely on Starlink for almost everything: home and business broadband, school connectivity and even the backhaul that keeps local mobile towers online in emergencies. If Starlink suffers a prolonged outage, changes its commercial terms or decides New Zealand is no longer strategic, large swathes of rural connectivity could be collateral damage.

What’s most startling is what Stewart discovered when he went digging into the Government’s thinking. Through 28 Official Information Act requests to ministries and regulators, he found very little evidence of cohesive, forward-looking analysis of these risks, despite international warnings about monopoly, displacement and sovereign risk in satellite broadband markets.

In our conversation, Stewart lays out how spectrum policy and lack of capital are boxing local wireless ISPs into a corner, why he believes current policy settings are accelerating a de facto monopoly, and what a more balanced model, including wholesale satellite access and better use of existing rural infrastructure and radio spectrum resources, might look like.

Listen to the full interview with Alex Stewart on The Business of Tech on iHeartRadio, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.