SpaceX based 4G/5G coverage coming to New Zealand

Source: Australian with a PLB that I take offshore sailing and bushwalking. Also have a 2yo who is impressively adept at getting a locked phone to enter emergency call mode.

I do a lot of bikepacking and everyone carries Garmin inReach or similar which allows you to send SMS and SOS via satellite in case of emergency.

You ideally want a seperate device like that because it has up to 14 days battery life and is a backup to your phone.

" Emergency We’ll ensure One New Zealand customers are safe during an emergency, so anyone with an appropriate One New Zealand phone will be able to call 111 in an emergency (when voice satellite calling is available). One New Zealand has dedicated part of its mid-band spectrum to enable the service. "

This says its only One (formerly Vodafone) customers.

edit: I notice the FAQ says something different and contradictory (which is what the parent mentioned), I wonder which is the truth?

Wouldn't this make the subscription satellite communications devices like inreach redundant, rather than PLBs? A safety conscious person in the wilds would probably still want a dedicated emergency device (?), only now it has another possible communication method to make it even more reliable.

PLBs as I understand it are designed specifically to be one-shot foolproof devices with no secondary comms, with guaranteed battery lives (15 years I think), robust cases etc. that just sit there until you press the 'Save me' button. A phone (or inreach which is closer but still has messaging etc.) is not a real replacement for that functionality as I see it. Mainly because the other things you use it for mean it can run out of batteries or whatever.

But let's do the back of the envelope math. A typical 5G base station would use a couple of KW of power. My guess is they'd use ones with more range, which probably means more power. Let's call it 5kw. I'm not an expert but that seems a reasonable number. Maybe it's a bit high. Maybe it's a bit low. I don't know, I'm probably biasing to too high.

So, if you'd need to power that 24x7 using solar you obviously need some battery and enough solar panels to top those up even on the most cloudy days. If you have a 50kw solar setup, you'd be generating 10x more power than you need on a sunny day for about one third of that day. So you end up with roughly 3x more power than you need at best and probably some reasonable portion of that on average. On a bad day that might drop by a factor 20. So, you need probably at least a week or two of battery to play it safe. If you assume a complete absence of light, you'd need about 120 kwh per day. Of course that's not realistic. So it could be a bit less than that as you always get at least some power. A tesla powerwall would be not enough, a tesla megapack (~2.7M $) would probably be overkill. Probably about a quarter to a fifth of that would be plenty. Probably less.

Not particularly cheap but doable probably. Add a windmill to the mix and you can probably get away with a lot less solar and battery. Probably a few hundred thousand would go a long way and a few tens of thousands would be on the low end of the spectrum. Let's call it 100K per site plus or minus 25% or so. Doing ten of these cost a million. Doing 1000 of these 100 million. Doing 10000 of these a billion.

New Zealand is a 100000 square miles (to stick with your numbers and miles). So, you'd need about 40000 of these things. So a few billion. I bet there are probably multiple creative ways to get that number down a bit. So, not cheap but doable. At worst billions in cost.

Especially considering that in a lot of areas this will open up coverage to, you could be the only user relying on it anyway.

There are about 5 million people in New Zealand. About 13 percent are rural. Let's say 30% of those are in areas where this would be useful, or about 4%. 200,000 people, and about half are the age and temperament to have a cellphone. Let's say they're using this data 1% of the time. That's 1000 people at a time, on average. So the useful data rate per active person is about 800kbps. That's not great, but still usable even for 240-360p video streaming, music streaming, navigation, normal web stuff. About 2.5 Gigabytes per month per 100,000 subscribers (although due to time of day, etc, that's probably more like a usable 1-1.5GB per month). For casual users with wifi at home, that's not that bad. I think my wife uses about that much or less.