by Alex Stewart

New Zealand has the highest rate of satellite broadband adoption in the OECD. I filed 28 Official Information Act requests across 18 agencies to find out what the government knew about the consolidation that produced it. Most had not been asked.

The Rural Blind Spot is a three-part investigation into what New Zealand’s government knows about rural broadband monopoly risk, and what it does not.

Part 1 covers the absence of analysis at the two agencies with direct responsibility. Part 2: “They Were Warned”, covers what the Commerce Commission’s own expert warned about, what the Commission did in response to the warning, and what MBIE officials had been tracking for at least 18 months before he was commissioned. Part 3: “In Confidence”, covers the consolidated dependency, the assessment the Defence Force did for itself, the work nobody did for civilians, and the advice the Minister holds but refuses to release.

For a dairy farm, connectivity schedules milk collection and files the compliance reports that underpin export access. For a rural school, it is how the roll gets taken and how a teacher runs a lesson that assumes the internet works. For a rural health provider, it is how a patient gets a telehealth appointment instead of a two-hour drive.

The primary industries that depend on this, dairy, meat, wool, timber, and horticulture, make up more than 80 per cent of New Zealand’s goods exports[1]. They operate outside the urban fibre footprint almost by definition. Their connectivity, increasingly, runs through a single operator headquartered in California, with no effective mechanism by which New Zealand can compel continued service on any particular terms.

Most New Zealanders have no reason to think about this. Most live in cities or fibre-served towns. Most have watched Starlink arrive the way anyone watches a new consumer product. With mild interest and little alarm, if any. The advertising is everywhere. The reviews are overwhelmingly positive. The government calls it market success. In that environment, it takes work to see why anything might be wrong.

But reliable connectivity is not the same as connectivity that worked today. Reliable connectivity is infrastructure that a community, a school, a civil defence coordinator, a farm, a processor, or a health service can confidently plan around over time. It assumes someone is responsible for it. It assumes someone is watching what is happening with it. It assumes that if something goes wrong, there is a process for fixing it that does not depend on the goodwill of a foreign commercial operator.

For most of New Zealand’s rural connectivity history, that assumption has held approximately. It is not holding now.

The question is not whether the connection is fast. The question is whether anyone is responsible for it.

I tested whether anyone was. This is what came back.

Full disclosure

I am Alex Stewart, managing director of WombatNET, a rural wireless broadband provider operating in the Wellington region. What I bring to this investigation is seven years of experience building and operating rural wireless infrastructure on the ground in communities with little to no terrestrial alternatives. That experience is the reason I knew which questions to ask. The answers came back from official government records, not from me, so they stand on their own.

WombatNET has never received direct government funding and is also a competitor to Starlink. I’d like readers to be aware of this up front because it matters to how you read the rest of this series. It should not, however, determine whether you read it.

What came back

The 28 requests went out under a pseudonym, so the agencies would respond to the questions rather than to the person asking them. I expected someone, somewhere, to have already looked at this.

This week covers two of those agencies. The Commerce Commission, which is New Zealand’s competition watchdog, and MBIE, the department responsible for telecommunications policy and the economic advice that informs ministerial decisions.

Between them, those two agencies received seventeen specific questions.

The Commerce Commission received twelve. Eleven came back blank under section 18(e) of the Official Information Act. Section 18(e) means, simply: the information does not exist. It has not been written, it has not been analysed, nobody has ever been formally asked to[2].

The twelfth question yielded a single piece of information not previously in the public domain. The Commission has an active Commerce Act complaint from a regional telecommunications provider concerning potentially predatory promotional pricing by a satellite internet provider. The complaint is still being considered. There is no disclosed analytical framework for evaluating it.

MBIE received five questions about the economic and resilience implications of terrestrial broadband declining in rural areas. All five came back blank. Across at least four years and two successive governments, no such assessment exists. No advice has been written on what it would mean if the ground-based networks rural New Zealand depends on are no longer viable, how quickly that scenario is approaching, or at what stage market intervention would be required or even possible[3].

Sixteen of seventeen questions. Blank.

A market nobody has been asked to study

Starlink’s rise in rural New Zealand has been anything but obscure. The Commerce Commission’s 2024 Annual Telecommunications Monitoring Report recorded satellite broadband at 19 per cent of rural connections as at June 2024[4]. According to the Commission’s February 2026 Competition Matters newsletter, the rural satellite share had risen to 27 per cent[5]. The Commission’s own commentary treats satellite and Starlink as effectively synonymous in the rural context, so those rural share figures describe Starlink’s position.

These numbers may seem modest at first glance, but this situation is atypical. The OECD tracks satellite broadband adoption per capita across its 38 member countries. New Zealand sits at the top, by a wide margin.

The next highest country in the OECD, the United States, sits at less than two-thirds of New Zealand’s rate. Most OECD countries sit below 0.3 per 100 inhabitants. New Zealand is at 1.29[6]. Whatever is happening here is happening here in a way it is not happening elsewhere.

And it is accelerating. On 15 April 2026, Chorus brought forward the retirement date of its national copper network from 2030 to 2028. Approximately 49,000 active copper connections remain in areas where fibre is not available, according to Chorus’s own reporting. In the three months to March 2026 alone, around 5,000 of those customers moved to other networks[7].

For a large share of customers moving off copper, satellite is the option within reach. The Commerce Commission’s August 2025 Copper Services Investigation found that satellite was available to approximately 100 per cent of rural copper households. Fibre was available to 0.2 per cent[8]. In the valleys and plains that the copper network once serviced, the inferred replacement network with universal reach is operated entirely offshore by a company headquartered in California.

Chorus described the transition as customers choosing “modern and reliable technologies like fibre, fixed wireless or satellite”[7]. The Commerce Commission’s 2024 data showed that when rural copper customers left the network, about 40 per cent switched to Starlink[9]. The Commission has not refreshed that split since. The 2025 market monitoring report is not yet publicly available.

All of this is in the public record. Still, nobody has been asked to formally assess what it means.

Why the blanks matter

For much of rural New Zealand, Starlink has been undeniably transformative. Households that had spent years paying premium prices for geostationary connections that buffered and dropped out in rain now have something workable. Communities that had nothing now have something.

The conditions for that transformation were already in place long before Starlink arrived. The funding ratios, the spectrum process, and the near-universal absence of fibre beyond the urban footprint are not Starlink’s doing. They are the record of how rural connectivity was, and was not, built here. Starlink satellites floated into a space-like, New Zealand-shaped vacuum that had been decades in the making.

That is why New Zealand’s position in the OECD chart looks the way it does. Not because our rural communities are unusually enthusiastic about satellite, but because the alternatives have historically either been regulatorily blocked or structurally absent. The rest of the OECD is not ahead of New Zealand in deploying satellite. They are ahead of us in deploying the terrestrial networks that most countries treat satellite as a supplement to.

That distinction has been at the centre of my investigation. The market has answered the question of whether the technology is useful. The other question, what happens to a country that has unwittingly consolidated its rural connectivity strategy onto a single foreign-controlled provider with no meaningful way to influence its behaviour, has not been asked. No New Zealand agency has formally assessed it. That is what the above responses confirm, and what the further requests across the national security apparatus, foreign affairs, the Privacy Commissioner, and the Defence Force establish. I cover those in Part 3.

The observations that the formal analysis was missing were already on the record. In October 2024, MBIE ran a consultation on retiring the copper phone technology that still serves the most remote rural households, the ones outside both fibre and mobile coverage. Of the 485 households written to, 38 responded. A Taihape household wrote that without copper, when the power goes out, which it often does, they have no way of reaching emergency services. An Akaroa household wrote that without power or Wi-Fi, and with no cell coverage they expect will ever arrive, they have no way to reach help in an emergency[10]. The pattern across submissions is near-universal: No mobile coverage. Satellite requires power. Copper did not. People admit they are or will be worse off.

Those submissions sat inside MBIE two years prior to the ministry telling me no advice existed on whether infrastructure diversity serves resilience in rural areas. The analysis did not need to be commissioned. The record was already there.

A second constellation is coming

Amazon Leo, the company’s own Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation, is slated to begin commercial operations in mid-2026[11]. A second provider will likely moderate Starlink’s pricing in the short term. It will not, however, change the structural picture. If both providers are foreign-controlled and subject to no obligations to maintain pricing, continue coverage, or provide wholesale access, the result shifts from an unregulable monopoly to an unregulable duopoly.

Whether a second constellation helps or compounds the picture depends on arrangements New Zealand has not yet negotiated, and on leverage that diminishes once the service is live. I address this in more detail in Part 3.

An analytical vacuum

That is the structural finding from the two agencies with direct statutory responsibility for monitoring this market. It is not an isolated finding.

What the documented trail of blank responses shows is not just an absence of specific reports that WombatNET may be interested in seeing as a competitor. They signify a total structural analytical vacuum. Decisions about the future of rural telecommunications infrastructure, copper deregulation, levy frameworks, and the executive regulatory response to accelerating market concentration are being made without a factual or analytical foundation. What does exist is evidence of pointed observations inside government. Apparently, though, nobody was ever asked to turn them into an analysis.

When the OIA responses started coming back, I expected to find the work had quietly been done and that I was late to the party. Instead, I found nothing, over and over.

The government lacked a foundation for action, but it did not lack a warning. It had multiple.

Read Part 2: They Were Warned –  what the Commerce Commission’s own expert said, what MBIE officials had documented internally before he said it, and the spectrum policy failure that produced the situation the industry warned about three years earlier.

The Rural Blind Spot. An independent-of-government investigative series by Alex Stewart.

References