Griffin on Tech: Starlink surges, Kim Dot Gone
Taking a mid-winter break in Rarotonga last week, a friendly local turned up at our Airbnb with a white box under his arm.
He had arrived to install Starlink, the satellite broadband service from Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX. After a half hour scrambling around on the roof on the villa we were staying in, he plugged in the flat, white router, gathered up his tools and left. Within minutes I was surfing on the STARLINK Wifi hotspot.
Vodafone, the Cook Islands’ only national mobile carrier had the previous day had a lengthy and massive data outage affecting Rarotong and the outer islands. So we went from having no internet access to Starlink download speeds of 277Mbps (megabits per second).
While resorts and businesses in Rarotonga have fibre access, Starlink is a game changer for small businesses, and residents, particularly those in the outer islands, who now have a reliable and reasonably priced link to the outside world.
Kiwis have also been installing Starlink at a furious pace according to the Commerce Commission’s latest 2023 Telecommunications Monitoring Report, with satellite connections increasing from 12,000 to 37,000 in the year to June 30, 2023. The vast majority of those are Starlink connections. A telco CEO told me last month that Starlink alone was approaching 40,000 connections so growth since the ComCom survey has continued at pace.
While I feel sorry for New Zealand’s hard-working wireless ISPs, who have invested in connecting rural communities, Starlink is part of the answer to our patchy rural broadband connectivity. I know several people who are now able to affordably work from rural locations thanks to installing Starlink, which is very easy to set up.
As Chris Keall wrote in the Herald this week: “Starlink has run aggressive discounts on its satellite dish install kits (which are $599 standard), and over the past few months, it has introduced a “deprioritised data” plan that costs $79 per month (a full-speed plan is $159/month.”
The company is clearly keen to dominate the market before other broadband providers get their own satellite constellations into orbit and operational. The question now is to what extent the Government decides to lean on Starlink as a solution to solving lingering connectivity issues in rural areas.
Dotcom and Bitconned
While on holiday I watched the Netflix documentary Bitconned, a rather sad and sordid tale of three young grifters who in 2017 set up Centra, a company claiming to offer a debit card that could link to users’ cryptocurrency wallets, allowing them to spend their Bitcoin or Ethereum at retailers.
Centra was no more than a hacked-together website, the text of which was copied from other tech companies. They even invented an imaginary CEO who existed only as a bogus LinkedIn profile. The trio, riding the boom in crypto startups at the time, managed to raise US$32 million in an initial Coin Offering (ICO) as well as significant cash from a South Korean company they conned into investing in Centra. The mastermind of the scam, Ray Trapani, loved expensive sportscars, parties on the Miami waterfront, and carried bundles of Centra investors’ cash around with him.
Watching Bitconned reminded me of Kim Dotcom, and the flashy displays of wealth he exhibited over a decade ago when the Dotcom mansion in Coatesville was party central. Dotcom was back in the news this week. After a 12-year legal fight, the Government has signed off on his extradition to the US where we will face a trail for the rampant content piracy his Megaupload platform facilitated in the heyday of file locker services.
Few will be sad to see Dotcom board his flight to the US. Unlike Centra, Megaupload wasn’t a scam, users flocked to it for the free and fast filesharing it facilitated. But Dotcom’s claims that it was no different to Google Drive or Dropbox rang hollow.
The extensive evidence collected suggests he knew exactly the extent to which it had become a beacon of piracy on the internet and he was content to let the Megaupload dollars continue to roll in from his illegal enterprise. His colleagues Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk were smarter and a lot less arrogant than Dotcom. They entered plea deals, avoiding extradition and a stint in Club Fed.
Barring any last-ditch legal masterstroke to avoid extradition, Dotcom will now face the wrath of the entertainment industry and US justice system. It will be a mini media sensation given Dotcom’s flamboyant persona. But finally, it won’t be happening on our dime and sucking air out of public discourse here. Mā te wā to the larger-than-life German.
