ACCC/AER Regulatory Conference 7 August 2026
Space, spectrum and statutes – regulating amid technological disruption
MICHAEL DRAKE: We are going to move straight into our next session which takes us from the matters of regulation and productivity to the extraterrestrial frontier of space. We have had a few sessions touch on new technology and their disruptive powers. In this session we will be discussing a particular new technology of LEO satellites and some of the impacts they are having on our various telecommunications markets. I will welcome the panel on stage now. Commanding this mission into space is ACCC Executive General Manager of the infrastructure division, Nicole Ross. Please welcome Nicole. (APPLAUSE)
NICOLE ROSS: Hi, everyone. Michael has introduced me helpfully. My title is lengthy and every Senate Estimates I always regret having to get all the words out. In the vain of Matt Garbutt’s fabulous dinner speech last night and the confessional nature, I will confess that I love complexity and making sense of it. Today’s session on space, spectrum and statutes I think is sure to deliver so I will introduce my panel members today. We have Luke Coleman who is the CEO of Australian Telecommunications Alliance. Luke has close to 20 years experience in the Telco industry working across government, operators, vendors and media. Prior to being CEO of ATA he was head of government and corporate affairs at Vocus and has been an advisor to a number of government communications ministers. We also have Daniel Featherstone, an Associate Professor at RMIT University. He has 25 years’ experience in First Nations media communications and digital inclusion. He is the principal research fellow at RMIT University and we are really interested in hearing what he has to say about the experience of people out in communities. We also have Tristian Gilbertson who is the Telecommunications Commissioner at the New Zealand Commerce Commission. Finally, Affandy Johan is an industry analyst with Ookla Research and he will give us evidence and data to start us off with. Thanks, Affandy. (APPLAUSE)
AFFANDY JOHAN: Thank you, Nicole. Good morning. Just to start off, there is a good chance many of the phones that is in this room, or in your pockets right now has connected to a satellite directly for the past year. For most part you didn’t have to do anything, so no apps, no fictitious disconnect, just connected directly. For a lot of people they probably didn’t realise that was happening in the background. My name is Affandy. I am an industry analyst from Ookla. I am based in Malaysia. I hope today I will share some of what our data and our insights show when it comes to satellite connectivity and in Australia and New Zealand and as well as the broader region and globally and where we are headed. Just to start off, I hope many of you here have heard the name speed test before? If you have ever tested your Internet speed at home on your mobile phone you used the speed test app. Ookla is behind the speed test app. We also are behind Downdetector and Ekahau. But our main mission is to offer better connectivity to all wherever you are. What I am going to show you today is pretty much from our speed test data, coming from our speed test data. This is a crowd source data from real users, using real devices in the real environment – real use case. This is very relevant, especially when we are talking about satellite connectivity, how it is performing as well as further I will talk about direct to device trends. With that out of the way let me show you the data.
First off, just to give what our data shows in terms of adoption when it comes to satellite broadband connectivity. On this chart what I am showing is the difference between unique devices that has been used, in this case Starlink broadband services within Q2 last year and Q1 of this year. There is an increase in terms of usage adoption. If you look in Australia, there is an increase of more than 50%, New Zealand more than 20%. More and more people coming into the satellite broadband services. However, it is not a uniform trend. If we look at other markets as well, some have expended some have reduced. Look at the Philippines there. There is many factors to this but two main factors that we observe is really because of fibre connection availability, so whether it is easy to get fibre access as well as the satellite connectivity so pricing is a big factor, whether more people adopt these services or not. So in areas where you have good fibre or have more access to fibre than the services tend to reduce the adoption of satellite and for areas where the pricing is fair and the fibre services. If you take the Philippines for example, there has been a big push by operators within the past year to provide more fibre access to many of the smaller islands as more the rural areas. That is why we see many of these places rely on Starlink previously. Many of the places naturally prefer fibre services instead of satellite connectivity. This means for operators and regulators as well you can actually – if you think about it, you can use Starlink’s adoption and location as a heat map of where areas where the terrestrial networks aren’t permitting the demand of users on the ground.
Next, if you look at the performance of satellite connectivity speed over the same period, many markets, the speed tests reduce. It is easing off. This is because – again if you notice markets where the trend adoption has increased a lot, the speed tends to ease off. It doesn’t mean it is a bad network, it just means it is capacity trying to meet the demand on the ground. One thing – what this means is we can’t just monitor the performance at one specific time, it is a rolling window. We need to continuously monitor the performance of the satellite services over time because what you are experiencing now might not be the same experience in the next two years for example.
Then the performance data is latency. We have seen it has improved over time in many markets. There are many factors to this but probably one major factor is proximity to the ground station – Starlink’s ground station. In markets where you have a reasonable number of ground station, you see the latency trending down over time. What this means, what happens on the ground actually matters and this is a point for the regulators, when you talk about how you improve satellite connectivity into your own market.
Back to the phones and talking to the satellite. What we call direct to device. This is a new service that is offered by the satellite providers where you can directly connect to your phones without any special new conditions. If you look at the offering of this service globally it has picked up and it is a mosaic of different satellite constellation by different service providers. A few months ago, there is more than 20 markets that offered D2D services, the basic form of text messaging as well as now more markets are offering at base D2D. Australia and New Zealand, one of the markets that is the first one to flip the switch and turn on the services thanks to Telstra and New Zealand and Philippines was the first market to launch D2D services as of June a few months ago in South East Asia.
When we talk about D2D what I am showing you who is actually using it. If you look at how many people are using it and how often are they using it? That is the intensity part and the reach part. The markets in Australia is the top left corner there. What that means is you have more people accessing it and more frequently. This is a good way to understand how well or whether that service is actually beneficial to the people. There is a lot of factors in it. Some operators are offering it for free at the moment, some you have to pay for it. This will change over time.
Here, this is a fun way they are using it. Interestingly in Australia and New Zealand, it follows the sun. Pretty much summer period we see the number of examples increases. I guess that is where everyone is out camping and boating and in the outback and you get access to satellite more often and use it more. It tapers or drops during winter. It is not unique to Australia and New Zealand only. It reduces in the northern hemisphere as well.
Finally, I think I want to leave you with one very interesting use case of direct to device satellite services here. If you remember in June this year a few months ago, part of the Philippines was affected unfortunately by a major earthquake, a 7.8 in the Mindanao island. The regulators there proactively then allowed the operators to switch on the D2D services in the country. Fortunately, the operator has been testing D2D in the previous months since earlier this year. After the earthquake they turned it on. They actually offered, provided access to 700,000 people affected in the region and according to them, 150,000 devices or users actually accessed the services during the earthquake, either to call emergency services or to call families. If the data shows, like what we saw, 20% of all the samples came from that region during that period in June alone. It is similar what we saw in Venezuela as well, during the major earthquake that happened a few months ago. In Venezuela, they had zero D2D samples, then for it to peak within five days and interestingly it followed the sequence of where the network failed. If you plot out, in terms of D2D samples it follows where the network failed because either there is no power or generator died and the increase of samples within the D2D services and people accessing those services.
The three main takeaways I wanted to share with you now. One is we can use satellite connectivity as a heat map to understand where terrestrial network can probably be improved. Second, is that performance varies over time so we do need to continuously monitor the satellite service providers to make sure they deliver the performance that we expect. Finally, I think in terms of resilience, satellite connectivity and D2D especially is an important form to help in times of crisis, right. What does this mean to regulations? This is part of the discussion I am going to have with the panel here. Thank you, very much. (APPLAUSE)
NICOLE ROSS: Thanks, Affandy. It was good of you to bring in the Australia/New Zealand natural rivalry by charting us. It is good to see we’re tracking pretty closely. We will try and put this session into two parts. We will talk about what the issues are and I think it is issues not one, and then we will talk about what next, what should be done? Tristian, from a regulator’s perspective, how has the rapid deployment of the LEO satellite services impacted Telco markets in New Zealand and how is the market responding?
TRISTIAN GILBERTSON: Good morning. It is great to be here. We started monitoring LEO back in 2021 just after Starlink entered the New Zealand market. We have been following it very closely and for us the biggest impact is in rural broadband where we have seen two major shifts. The first shift is in performance, Starlink is delivering average peak time speeds of 234 megabits per second at the moment as measured by the measuring broadband New Zealand program. That is four times faster than the next best alternative, 4G fixed wireless and 20 times faster than basic copper. It is a real game-changer. It is giving rural Kiwis an urban level of broadband experience for the very first time. The second shift is in competitive dynamics. Starlink has captured 27% of the rural market, it has become the biggest rural broadband provider in just four years. That is a big shift in market share. Most of that has come from copper. Copper has fallen from 58% to just 10% share. It is no longer the dominant technology it once was. Fixed wireless, the other major rural technology has largely held steady at 33% share. But it has had to work much harder to do that through sharper performance and pricing and network investment. There is much greater competitive intensity in the rural market now than there ever was before.
Interestingly when we look at switching patterns and how consumers are responding to the new choices they have got, not everyone is choosing Starlink. 54% are choosing Starlink. They are chasing the faster speeds but the other 46% are sticking with local providers even though they know that is going to give them a slower service. That is interesting and suggests a couple of things. There is still likely a degree of nervousness around the newness of the technology and perhaps Starlink as a provider. Things like local presence and on the ground support that Starlink doesn’t offer still seem to matter more than speed for many rural consumers. In rural New Zealand speed matters but it is not everything.
On the industry side, there has been some concern about where disruption is heading. The risk of a Starlink slight monopoly has been the single biggest concern but the arrival of Amazon later this year should help address that. The risk of satellite displacing terrestrial wireless competitors is another concern but that is not something we are seeing on the current evidence.
Finally, it will be interesting to see just how things change or start to change all over again when Amazon does arrive. Amazon said it is going to be doing things differently from Starlink. We are expecting to see a differentiation but we don’t know what that looks like until the launch happens. In the meantime, what we can say is there is more change coming and we are looking forward to seeing what that does for competition and consumers.
NICOLE ROSS: Thanks, Tristian and some really interesting observations there about what consumers are choosing at present. I know we have had some questions already around impacts of first mover and what that might do to the market. Daniel, what do you think this means for consumers? Tristian’s touched on it a little but what are some of the opportunities and challenges, particularly in rural and remote areas in the consumers you are talking to?
DANIEL FEATHERSTONE: Thanks, Nicole. I see similar trends happening to what Tristian is describing. Probably more so for the remote areas that we are visiting. I will start by saying I won’t speak to the experience of all consumers but we travel out to remote First Nations communities, we talk to a lot of the service providers as well as household residents. The LEO sats as Tristian described, as we have seen in the data are absolutely transforming the situation in remote Australia. Currently the benefits remain uneven. The core issue is not simply whether we have LEO statistics creating competition but whether they are providing affordable, reliable sustainable connectivity and meeting the consumer safeguards we expect in Australia. We have over 600,000 Starlink plans now in Australia. It was 589,000 in December and it had gone up in six months from 400,000 and we can see 50% increase since this time last year. Basically, it is rocketing. Everywhere I go around Australia I am seeing Starlink billboards. It is everywhere the advertising is prolific. The uptake is going through the roof and Starlink want to make sure they have as much coverage as possible before NBN bring in Amazon as their provider for the LEO. Right now Sky Muster only has less than 75,000 plans out there – out of their 300,000 potential households. We have real choice and flexibility now for those who can access it. Yes, there is a fantastic service available. People are taking it up because it is fast, low latency and unlimited data. It is very reliable in wet season. So this is a big issue in northern Australia. The geostationary satellites, the signal breaks up a lot in wet season in heavy cloud. This is something that is a real difference in the quality of service and reliability.
However affordability is creating a new local digital divide. The First Nations households we speak to, previously there was very few would take up on a post paid plan. What we know is less than 7% of households had a broadband service previously. While Starlink is a post paid plan, we are seeing in this last year suddenly a lot more households taking up on it and there is a number of reasons for that. Firstly, prolific advertising. There is word of mouth. People are hearing how good it is and they want that. But also households in the communities we are visiting don’t have TV services working a lot of them, so 70% of households don’t have vast TV working. It was rolled out in 2013 without a maintenance plan, a lot of households don’t have TV and that is what people want is streaming of TV and Netflix and YouTube. They also want access to the same services that everyone else has and the mobile coverage is not that great in a lot of these communities.
Post paid bills make it quite difficult for people to maintain a service so we are expecting a drop-off of in the number of households that have a service in a years time when we go back. They are all coming in with discounted entry plans. It may drop off. We know broadband is essential infrastructure now. Everybody needs to be able to access online services and this is a driver. We have Closing the Gap target around digital inclusion for First Nations people. Access is the biggest challenge in remote communities. This is a critical part of that story.
Direct to device, we will hear more about direct to device but it is improving safety. Where I go, my iPhone works with the satellite. I can see the signal. When I am out of mobile range, however that is on an iPhone or Samsung high level phone at the moment. Universal outdoor mobile obligation that is coming in towards the end of next year is meant to allow everyone to be able to send messages from wherever they are, over Optus, TPG or Telstra. We are yet to see how that will work for prepaid plans and for the cheaper phones in the market. I will leave it there.
NICOLE ROSS: Thanks. There are some really interesting issues there. There has been a rapid take-up and consumers are really interested, longer term and what happens next is going to be key. Luke, how are service providers looking at it and what do you think are the implications for industry structure and regulatory obligations?
LUKE COLEMAN: Thanks Nicole. It has been a wild 48 hours on this front. ACCC announced its roaming inquiry, more than just roaming – roaming and potential regulated access to RAN, well played ACCC dropping that bombshell a day before the conference kicked off. The same day that is announced, Starlink is doing its financial results in the US, SpaceX, the owners of Starlink. They say we are going to get into the terrestrial mobile market as well in the US.
If you rewind to when the ACCC last looked at roaming in 2018 no-one had heard of LEOs, they didn’t even exist. It was the stuff of science fiction. It was Telstra, TPG, Optus, the usual players taking position. It is a different world today. You now have a potential new player in Starlink which, depending which way the inquiry goes, could effectively have access to terrestrial mobile infrastructure while also operating that global LEO infrastructure. Layered on top of that, there is legislation before parliament to establish UOMO, an obligation on terrestrial mobile operators to get into bed with the LEO operator so they can provide services where they don’t have terrestrial coverage.
But it is not just Starlink. Direct to device brings a whole new layer of complexity into this with the device-makers themselves. Rewind 20 years, the device you bought – your mobile phone – was very carrier centric. It might have a Telstra button on the device. It might have built-in access to their application. Over the last 20 years, that has changed dramatically. The device-makers have more control than they would have 20 years ago now, but especially so when it comes to direct to device technology.
Why? Think of it like VHS versus Betamax back in the 80s. You have two rival technologies delivering direct to device. With one technology what we are seeing in Australia and New Zealand today with One New Zealand is using terrestrial mobile spectrum to connect to your existing hand set but using that spectrum to connect through to a Starlink satellite. That is VHS. And then Betamax, the rival technology – what we call MSS, mobile satellite spectrum, a dedicated spectrum band that is only available to satellite operators where you have your own lane on the freeway to use that spectrum. You need a special chip set in your mobile phone so it is only modern mobile phones that can use this, but you then have another connection through to the satellite.
This is where it gets wild. You can have an iPhone with a Telstra SIM in it out in a regional area and where you are using Telstra’s terrestrial spectrum to connect to a Starlink satellite, simultaneously that iPhone has a chip in it which is connected through to the Globalstar network, because Apple has a separate contract with Globalstar to have that direct to device capability. You have two different satellite operators, a terrestrial operator and a device-maker with all these different kinds of connectivity, each of which is operating in a different regulatory environment. We have yet to grapple with the implications of that.
You go to make a triple zero call or send a triple zero text when you are out in the middle of the country, and you can’t send a text to triple zero. We don’t have that in Australia. But Apple has a proprietary service that allows you to text triple zero via their relationship with Globalstar satellites, so that text is completely bypassing not only your terrestrial Australian mobile operator, but it is bypassing the traditional triple zero service as we know it. It is being routed globally and sent back to the triple zero operator in Australia through a proprietary service. Imagine the implications of this. An emergency service that comes as an added extra when you buy a mobile phone? This is not the stuff of sci-fi. This is the reality of the world we live in today.
This opens up a bunch of questions about sovereignty. We are used to living in and regulating a world where Australian telcos are the focus of that regulatory environment. But think of this: Apple, second largest company in the world. Amazon: fifth largest company in the world. SpaceX: ninth largest company in the world. Samsung: 13th largest company in the world. Any of those companies on their own have a market cap that is bigger than the entire Australian telecommunications sector combined. That is the environment we are operating in today.
Will Australia will have its own LEO satellite network? Are we handing over our sovereignty to US domiciled telecommunications providers and handset providers that already have the capability to completely bypass Australian network operators? That is the implications of the world we are living in now.
NICOLE ROSS: Thanks Luke. I did say I loved complexity. I am not going to promise answers now. You mentioned our mobile inquiry that we kicked off and given the complexity we are in listening mode and learning mode. I am going to come back to Affandy towards the end, but Tristian, what lessons do you think regulators can learn and should be learning right now from the LEO disruption that we are seeing?
TRISTIAN GILBERTSON: Three lessons from our perspective. The first is old tools are still relevant in new markets. One of the first things we had to do, unfortunately, when D2D was launched in New Zealand was crackdown on misleading advertising. D2D is an exciting innovation but we were seeing advertising straying well beyond the limits of the service. Including claims of 100% coverage and suggestions that it would work like an ordinary terrestrial mobile service, even inside. We had to issue a stop now and prosecute to get things back on track. That was unfortunate but it did bring the limitations of the technology into sharper public focus. It reminded providers that exciting innovations need to be accurately described.
The second lesson is to be prepared for the noise and pressure that can come with disruption. There are always rumblings in industry in New Zealand about Starlink but things have got a lot noisier over the past 12 months, surprisingly so. We have been getting increasingly loud demands for some sort of intervention from smaller local providers who are feeling the greatest competitive pressure from Starlink. That is understandable on one level. But, commercial pressure by itself is not a sign that competition is failing and the volume of the debate should never determine the regulatory response.
That leads to the final lesson which is the value of market monitoring as a navigational tool, as Affandy has touched on. We found market monitoring has given us the evidence to see through the noise and be guided by what’s actually happening in the market. It has helped us separate concerns that might warrant some sort of attention, like barriers to expansion from other concerns that simply reflect the competitive process at work. It has helped us stay focused on our job which is protecting the process of competition rather than the interests of individual players in that process. So that consumer choice determines where the balance of competition will ultimately land. They are the three things from the New Zealand experience.
NICOLE ROSS: Thanks, Tristian. It is really easy to focus on the complexity of the technology and regulation and we need to remember that it is about the consumer, that is what ultimately markets are working towards. Daniel, what do you think governments, regulators and service providers need to be doing and focusing on to promote good outcomes for consumers, particularly in regional areas?
DANIEL FEATHERSTONE: Luke’s raised some of the concerns about having our – a lot of these services outsourced. We need to ensure we have consistent consumer protections in place no matter who the provider is, if they are working in Australia. That is around the pricing in contracts, reliable equipment and services, accessible complaints and customer support, hardship assistance, responsible sales practices, outage communication and so on. Right now Starlink has an online-only support system and that can be a challenge for people both when their connectivity is not working but also people with English as a second language or limited English.
Affordability is the other big one that we have got a lot of work going on in universal service frameworks and digital inclusion policy. At the moment LEOs aren’t playing a part in that, even though they are embedded within the future planning for the UOMO, they aren’t necessarily financially responsible for any of these outcomes. They are able to take what is the high value consumer market without necessarily contributing those consumer – or the service outcomes for as part of the universal service framework.
At the moment we have got a number of Wi-Fi networks being rolled out in remote communities to provide an affordable model for people living in remote communities who wouldn’t otherwise have a household service. There has been 53 of those that have been announced this year. They will most likely use Starlink or a LEO. We want to see more of that type of thing. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a household-only type plan. Shared networks can be part of that future as well. That expanded use of infrastructure rather than just assuming a western model of household-only services is critical as part of going forward. I am aware I am running out of time, so the directed device needs to be universal as I said before, not a premium service. This has to be available to the people who most need it and they are the people with the least affordability often. We need to fund the whole service life cycle, so making sure when services are installed that their funding installation, maintenance and replacement and removal. We have a lot of satellite dishes on roofs everywhere we go and we need to think about what we are doing with our space junk that is on our roofs.
NICOLE ROSS: Thanks Daniel, if you look at – there is a few things you can see on Google Maps with the junk circulating around the globe which is always alarming to look at. We are almost out of time. The clock is giving us the countdown now. I might finish as we started and come to you, Affandy, we have talked about the complexity of the technology and the changes consumers are facing and also what might start out looking like a really great solution and how it might change over time. What do you think will be some of the key indicators of effective regulation and good consumer and market outcomes if Tristian and all of us in this room can get it right?
AFFANDY JOHAN: That is a very good question. I will come from the measurement point of view, my angle we are looking at. First is if we are able to measure the gap between urban and rural, connectivity experience right. The whole point of having a solution like Starlink or LEO is to bridge that gap and Daniel, this is a very important topic to you as well. What you want is to be able to see that users in urban Brisbane, for example, have similar experience for people who are in the more rural areas having the same experience than the urbanised areas. It will be able to see that improvement over time and measure that is important. As regulators it is also important to make sure that the objective of providing connectivity to all communities is very important, right.
Then having a choice, like for the users, I mention what Tristian mentioned, in New Zealand where consumers who move from copper will tend to stay to the same provider if given the option, right, instead of moving to a satellite service. With satellite service there is – we see that the speed can go down and with fibre it is more stable. Using that information to help the operators to push the operators to decide where they need to expand the fibre connectivity is important as well so you can use that information to further improve the connectivity to other communities.
Finally, I think – also I mentioned about the earthquake so resilience, how do we measure resilience and make sure that in any major disaster events, that the connectivity stays on – available as long as possible. If you look at what happened – one example there was a speaker that came out, the Iberian power outage that happened last year or a few time ago, so we tracked that as well. What we saw was the mobile networks actually followed the power failure. Where power failed, the networks tend to fail. What is interesting is that you have different operators on the same street that had longer connectivity compared to the other operators. What that means is for mobile operators who are more prepared themselves, power generators making sure they have backup batteries. Users, or subscribers to that network had access to connectivity longer than the other networks. So this is an example where we can then use satellite connectivity to help these areas. The speaker mentioned that no-one could make calls so they couldn’t pay for fuel or something like that. Imagine if you had D2D and you were able to make text messages or calls at that time. That is something that would definitely will be very important during situations like this.
My take away to the regulators, it is something that we need to find a balance to make sure there is fair competition to the satellite providers, to the local terrestrial networks as well as how to use all these different technologies to make sure connectivity is provided for and in good quality, as well as – you have proper resilience when it comes to major events.
NICOLE ROSS: Thank you. I think it highlights the points that have been made, some really great opportunities with these new technologies but really the importance of thinking about consumers and making sure we get the cost benefit analysis right, as Dani mentioned before. I hope you join me in thanking our wonderful panellists. (APPLAUSE)
ENDS
