Inside One NZ: AI Innovations, Starlink Connectivity, and the Future of Telco with Kieran Byrne

Paul Spain:
Greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and this episode we have Kieran Byrne, who’s the Chief Technology Officer at One NZ. Welcome along, Kieran.

Kieran Byrne:
Thanks, Paul. Thanks for having me.

Paul Spain:
Great to have you in the studio and especially because it’s your first time on a podcast.

Kieran Byrne:
First time on a podcast, so make sure you’re nice.

Paul Spain:
So very privileged, look. Great to have you here. Thank you. Maybe you can just fill listeners in with sort of a short kind of overview of. Of what you do, what your role sort of consists of with One NZ.

Kieran Byrne:
So Chief Technology Officer, so responsible for our network network assets, all our IT infrastructure, cybersecurity and our wholesale business as well. So quite a varied portfolio. Been in the role for about nine months now.

Paul Spain:
Fantastic. Yeah, great to see you in the role. We’ve enjoyed chatting to Tony Baird in years gone by as well. So, yeah, great to have you here. Now, before we start, big thank you, of course, to our show partners, which includes One NZ, also 2 degrees, Spark, HP Workday and Gorilla Technology. So we really, really appreciate that support that keeps us going each week. Now, this week, really keen to kind of delve in and understand a bit of what’s going on behind the scenes at One NZ. We see glimpses and bits and pieces and varying things that kind of come through in the news, but of course you’ve got a much deeper view on these things.

Paul Spain:
So looking forward to delving into that, but also tapping in on a little bit of the most current news. And the thing that I guess, really stood out to me over the last week, and there are a lot of things going on, to be fair, but is this increasing role of AI and autonomy and particularly when it comes to vehicles. So two quite big events, I think, for the world of autonomous and driverless vehicles. First up, we had, I guess, earlier on last week was Tesla kicking off their sort of robo taxi service in a very, very limited kind of demo form. But some friendly influencers that were able to use their kind of rideshare app.

Kieran Byrne:
And nice cheap $4.20 price point.

Paul Spain:
If they’re $4.20 price point. What do you think that’s about, Karen?

Kieran Byrne:
No idea.

Paul Spain:
Old. Old muskey.

Kieran Byrne:
He.

Paul Spain:
He’s. He’s consistent. Anyway, any excuse for something with 420 in it. And he’s. And. And he’s there. Yeah. So it.

Paul Spain:
It is kind of. It is kind of comical the way these things are kind of, you know, carried through because he’s, you know, he’s I guess, you know, with what he does with SpaceX and other things, you think of it, you know, as being a pretty serious business and people’s lives at stake. And then he’s, then he’s kind of doing these, you know, cannabis jokes. But anyway, there we go. So, yeah, I mean, what did you think of sort of seeing, you know, seeing some of the videos and that news of the service being turned on because he had made this commitment that he was gonna launch the service. And I know you’ve tried out Waymo and San Francisco recently. I tried it out last year and also tried out the Tesla FSD or full self drive technology there last year, where it’s really an iteration of that technology which is what they’re turning on in the vehicles. And yeah, I wasn’t quite sure if they were going to make their deadline of turning things on last week, but they have done.

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah, pretty amazing tech really. As you mentioned recently drove in a Waymo, very different technology. It uses radar sensing and lidar and all sorts of positioning around it. Whereas obviously with Elon’s Robo taxi, it’s camera based, it’s meant to replicate human eyes and human vision and obviously meant to mean that it can be scaled anywhere across the world immediately. So he’s obviously got a strong vision that he’s going to go huge on this. The amount of robo taxis they’re talking about churning out of those factories in the next couple of years is pretty ambitious. As well as the Optimus robots, I don’t know what’s going on there, but we’re going to see marching out of these factories, robo taxis and humanoid robots, which is going to be an interesting change to the world, but fascinating technology and just a huge leap. And obviously, as you know, it’s AI everything at the moment in the tech space and it’s just another milestone for the industry.

Kieran Byrne:
And it’s interesting, the other day I, I actually bought a new car and I was probably thinking it’s probably the last car that I’ll actually be driving in the future and maybe even my kids who are seven year old twin boys at the moment, probably may even never learn to drive a car the way we’re heading. So it’s really fascinating.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, that is interesting and we’ve talked about that over a number of years and my son, he’ll be 15 this year and yeah, if we were going back seven or eight years, we were having that exact discussion. But now it’s actually, hold on, we’re so much closer because there Are levels of this happening in the us In China especially, I guess those are the two places where there’s any sort of scale. Now the scale is still pretty small. I think Waymo up to about 1500 vehicles. I think the biggest autonomous cabs ride sharing service in China is probably smaller than that. So they haven’t really scaled out incredibly far. But if anyone can get scale then Tesla, yeah, have that capability just because they’ve got a fleet of vehicles where people, I imagine some people will be happy to put their vehicles onto serve if that were needed. But the fact that they can churn out these vehicles at I think a fraction of the cost of, of what it is for Waymo.

Paul Spain:
And because their technology is designed in such a way that in theory it doesn’t need to be ring fenced. Now at the moment it pretty much is in Texas there. So I think, yeah, they’ve got a particular area of Austin that you are limited to and no doubt that brings some benefits for them as they’re working to improve the, the technology and the consistency.

Kieran Byrne:
But I mean, yeah, Elon Musk is all about scalability and going big. Right. And with the amount of testers out there now and they’re all delivering data back to them which is helping them optimize their autonomous play and that’s just going to scale and get better over time. And you know, the risk is obviously with the approach that they’re taking with the camera based, is they’ll have more incidents and accidents and more regulatory scrutiny and barriers to scaling. But yeah, they’re obviously trying to push through that and making this a mass adoption of this around the globe. And incredible speed it would be, I would imagine, the conversations that are being had in the background there.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah. I am curious because we had General Motors, gm, their service crews and they’ve got kind of their autonomous ride sharing service that started, that stopped, that got put on hold after an accident and doesn’t seem to have sort of fired up again. And there have already been comments around, well, Tesla’s being investigated because the vehicles weren’t working, maybe as well as what authorities might expect. But we certainly haven’t heard anything formal to say that they’ve been taken off the road. I think the last video I saw somebody sharing was maybe 24 to 48 hours old, so maybe 72, but reasonably recent. So it’s not clear whether they’ve paused their services or not. They certainly haven’t made any announcement down that track. But I guess after testing the technology last year, I could see There were definitely some shortcomings, but the technology’s been improving quite quickly.

Paul Spain:
So one video I heard somebody say they had probably done about 15,000. Was it kilometers or miles? Maybe I already put it into kilometres in my head, not sure, but certainly north of 10,000, maybe 15,000 kilometers. And they’d had a very good experience. In fact my impression was their comment was saying that they hadn’t had to engage and take over in that period of time, which was very different to what I experienced with Tesla FSD last year in San Francisco, where I saw it try to go the wrong way down a one way street, tried to go through what was effectively a red light for the direction I was wanting to head and it disengaging when certain circumstances where there were contrast problems because the vehicle was going from a bright day under a small bridge and it would disengage at that point.

Kieran Byrne:
I wonder how much of that’s driven by familiarity. If you’re driving 15,000 kilometres and you’re doing the same route every day and it’s learnt from that and there’s no barriers to doing that, well then it’s very easy. But if you’re the game for this play, which is very different from Waymo, which is geographically mapped and radar areas ring fenced in here, it knows exactly where it’s going, it’s very precise on its positioning on the road and its response to the lights. And if it’s bad weather it can still operate. And so it’s quite a different strategy. And with the Elon strategy you’re going to have to accept that there will be issues as it improves over time. Whereas the Waymos are much more low risk. There’s been far less, I think recently anyway.

Kieran Byrne:
Issues with Waymo.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, their data around disengagement seems to be a lot lower. Although you still see videos of people where a vehicle’s got, it’s kind of frozen partway through an intersection. I think I saw one of those in the last couple of days. There was another one where the way it was kind of trying to cut through traffic looked like it had, you know, no idea of, of, of how, how it, how it should be driving as a, as a, you know, a good member of society.

Kieran Byrne:
I saw one where it was being holding up traffic because there was a fire engine across its lane on the road and.

Paul Spain:
Oh, okay.

Kieran Byrne:
And it needed to go around it, but it didn’t want to do that because it want to cross the lane and there was a car sitting on the other side and so it was Just traffic was backing up behind and there’s things like that which are sort of fringe situations and they’ll get better over time, I’m sure of it.

Paul Spain:
Whereas the Tesla technology just seems to go with it. Right. It doesn’t actually seem so bothered around, you know, the rules. And it’s more like a human, a human in terms of a willingness to maybe sort of push the limits a little bit. And there was, you know, one of the live streams that somebody or video that somebody shared from last week in the robo taxi, which a Tesla Model Y is not the robo taxi that they kind of demonstrated a few months ago, but it was coming up to turn across an intersection and then it appeared to kind of change its mind and then it kept going. But because of the way that that was, I guess a left turning lane which basically if you were to go straight from that lane, you’d end up in the oncoming traffic. Cause that was then a left turning lane from that side. And yeah, the Tesla just drove across and was therefore on the wrong side of the road for a period until it re entered the next turning bay, which, yeah, you definitely see there’s a big contrast between those two approaches.

Kieran Byrne:
And I just always, always go back to, you know, this technology’s very, very new and we tend to focus on the mistakes that it makes and things like that. But you know, you’ve got to project forward to five or ten years time. Yeah, you believe, strongly believe this stuff has been resolved and we’re highly reliant on these autonomous vehicles which work in a very safe and accurate way. So we’ve got to get over this initial period. But yeah, I hope we just don’t push so far that it gets the allergic reaction.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, look, I think these things will get a lot better and it’s really. How quickly does it happen? Who are the companies that are going to lead having a discussion with someone who’s a big Tesla fan and investor last week and I exited Tesla earlier on in the year and been watching what Wave AI are doing out of the UK and they’ve talked about having trialled their technology for autonomous vehicles in 90 cities across seven countries. Now, Tesla haven’t shared how many countries exactly that they’ve tried their technology in, but we know that they have tried in New Zealand because they employed some people that were testing out the technology.

Kieran Byrne:
They’ll be doing it everywhere.

Paul Spain:
Going back some time, they’ve shared a video doing it in Australia. So they should be able to operate in a lot of places. But how that actually sort of scales we will see in time. Now an interesting sort of tie in from the way this type of technology works where we’re talking about making technology, making AI the driver of a vehicle. When it comes to running networks and technology systems these days, there’s more and more of a move to kind of, you know, hand over some of that workload to AI. So, you know, how does that look like for, you know, for you, whether it’s sort of now or looking forward in terms of, you know, how much can your networks be run autonomously by AI and you know, I guess your usage, the amount of data, all of the things that are going on in your networks, you know, continues to scale and, and evolve and cyber challenges and the like. So no doubt it’s pretty helpful to be able to lean in on these technologies.

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah. As you can imagine now, autonomous networks is a phrase which you hear a lot when you’re talking to anyone in the industry or any of the vendors. And it’s getting quite real now. I mean, we’ve got industry frameworks now which talk about levels of autonomy. You can get to a network from 1 to 5, where 5 is a completely self optimising, self healing, self running network. And that’s still a bit in the future.

Paul Spain:
So do these kind of line up with what we see for autonomous vehicles as well? Cause I think that’s a scale up to 5 as well. Are there sort of a lot of similarities?

Kieran Byrne:
Well, there’s a lot of similarities in the sense that you’re moving from something which is heavily manual, human based, driving a car through to a point where it’s completely hands off the wheel and the thing is running on itself, it’s making its own decisions, self optimizing, it’s making changes in real time. And so quite a lot of analogies in there. There’s a path to get there from where we are now. Obviously the thing that’s happening in parallel is networks are actually getting more complicated. Like the network functions built into our core network, there’s more and more of them that we need to patch and maintain and upgrade. And we’d have to scale the workforce substantially just to keep up with the pace of the technology we’re deploying. So AI is actually really critical to us just to even keep our employee base constant, let alone take people out. So yeah, so it’s, yeah, it’s a really interesting transition that we’re going through.

Kieran Byrne:
We’ve already started a number of AI based use cases in the network. Self optimizing, whether it’s self optimization in the radio network, energy efficiency, powering down sites when there’s no load on them. We’ve also deployed an AI agent that can report on an individual’s customer’s experience on the network, so it can look through a whole lot of network data. And if a customer calls us up and says, look, I’m really unhappy with your network, I’m getting all these problems, can actually tell them, oh well, we had a sell site out during that time or there was an issue, there was some congestion, we’re working on it in this way and make these changes. So it’s quite an exciting time. And yeah, I think it’ll be a three to four year journey to get to some sort of high level of autonomy, maybe up to the level four in this scale where there are huge humans in the loop. But a lot of the network functions will be happening on a much more automated basis. But yeah, it’s really, really interesting time to be in the industry and how.

Paul Spain:
Important will it be to have, I guess, expert engineers that know every area of the technology? I would say look back over time at some of the technologies I’ve been involved in. And if you go back sort of 10, 20, the further you go back, the less deep your knowledge is on those older systems. But sometimes you actually need to keep some of the older technologies and bits and pieces in operation to some degree or another. But of course, in theory, AI can pick up and learn those things. So yeah, do you see challenges in terms of the depth of expertise you need to keep in different areas and how much you’ll lean into do AI on.

Kieran Byrne:
I mean, we certainly have that challenge at the moment because we have equipment in our network in certain areas which might be 20, 30 years old. And there’s one or two people who understand how it works. Like I could walk into any one of our data centers and there would not be one person in the organization who could go through and say what everything is and how it works. It’s a collection of different domains in different areas and we’re on a modernization journey that every telco’s on at the moment and a lot of consolidation of old infrastructure. Our organization has been built from the acquisition of a number of different entities over time. Telstra Clear and IHAG and various other entities. And yeah, we’re in the process of just decommissioning and decommissioning and decommissioning a whole lot of old stuff at the moment. Copper networks going and really getting to a state where we have sort of modern containerized architecture that’s scalable, it’s upgradable, patchable, all these sort of things that we need to be able to sort of run this new, modern, fast paced space network environment.

Kieran Byrne:
So, yeah, it’s pretty exciting and a lot of investment going in over the next few years to sort of get us ready for this wave of AI.

Paul Spain:
Can you talk a little bit to the challenges? Because I guess different listeners will come from different environments and smaller organizations. It’s often reasonably easy to modernize the technology systems that an organization uses because they might not have a whole lot. And particularly if there are particularly new fresh organizations, they start with what’s modern and so on anyway. But anytime I talk to someone who’s kind of got depth in a large organization, yeah, you realise that there are so many complexities and bits and pieces that in some cases have been around for a really long time. Sometimes these things get exposed if they say a cyber incident or there’s acquisitions and so on. And you hear about the different technologies coming together like you’ve talked about, I mean, how complex and hard is it to kind of modernize and get things onto kind of that ideal technology platform that you’d love to be on.

Kieran Byrne:
It’s not just about tech. It actually starts with the customer, it starts with product in the organization. We’ve sold a whole lot of things over the year and we’ve got products out there which need to be served by certain technology. And so we actually have to move the customers off that simplify our product offerings, retire legacy plans products in order to remove that equipment. And you’ll find you’ll have a major enterprise customer who has a whole lot of the modern products, but has a few of the old ones. And so do you migrate them onto new things? Do you let those products continue? And we’re going through that journey at the moment. Everything we need to do from a tech transformation perspective starts with how do we get customers onto a simpler set of modern products so we can decommission all the old technology that’s currently supporting them? And it’s not easy because you don’t just want to turn up to a customer and go, hey, we’re switching you off. And you want to do right by the customer and transition them.

Kieran Byrne:
So it requires to work with those customers, you know, making calls to them, designing new products, moving them across, transitioning them. It might involve price point changes, various things like that. And, and we’re going through this, we’re putting a lot of effort into this Product simplification. We’ve decommissioned so many legacy products over the past 12 months. We’ve moved a lot of price points. Our customers will well know discounts have been removed and various things. And that’s not about trying to upset our customers, it’s actually about trying to simplify our business so we can actually deliver better ultimately for customers going forward. And that unfortunately involves migrating customers onto new stuff, which sometimes causes friction.

Kieran Byrne:
But it’s a really, really important thing to simplify the business. And once you’ve simplified the business and you’ve got all the customers on those simple products, then you can really start to decommission that tech and get the benefits out of that modernization.

Paul Spain:
And so what are some of the pieces that you’d be decommissioning? Cause you mentioned Ihug acquisition and Telstra Clear and those are different systems to what you trying to generally run today, right?

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah. So copper’s a big one. So, you know, it’s quite interesting. If you look in and you walk into one of our data centers, a lot of the footprint is old copper switching systems and they’re huge. There’s racks and racks of the stuff and there’s a few little LEDs and lights on all over the place. Years ago it was all lit up, but it’s gradually winding down and so there’s a real focus on that. You get benefits of being able to switch these things off. You get power efficiency, savings.

Kieran Byrne:
You know, obviously the reliability of copper based products versus fiber based products or wireless products is a completely different ballgame. And so we’re a lot of the decommissioning at the moment is focused on that. And then on top of that is sort of the back book of, I guess, modern products that are built on the modern technology but have proliferated as we haven’t necessarily managed product lifecycles very well. And so, so it’s this mass sort of decommissioning at the moment. We want to get to a point where all our customers are on a simple set of plans across mobile, across broadband, business and enterprise, all the same. And then, yeah, then we’re in a good spot where we can just start flicking switches and turning stuff off.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I remember we had multiple services and we were getting a different bill for mobile than what we were for, I guess what would have been a Telstra Clear service and were in different systems. So there probably was no other way to do that.

Kieran Byrne:
Billing’s really hard as well, as you can imagine, when you’ve got multiple billing stacks because it’s really hard to sort of converge that into a single thing for the customer. And you’ll see sometimes on a one NZ invoice it says if you’re this type of customer, use this bank account. If you’re this type of customer, use this. And there’s different bank accounts for different billing stacks and we just need to get rid of that complexity and we’re making really good progress towards that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Oh, well, I’m glad you’ve taken it on, Karen.

Kieran Byrne:
It’s lot to do.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And talking about that role of AI and you were talking about being able to use the technology to I guess help you bring together a range of information. So if someone is calling up and is not super happy that you can then be drawing together a whole lot of data and rating what their experience maybe is like. What are the other uses that you’re finding for AI in terms of helping you lift your customer service? Which is, I think it’s probably a challenge in every field these days. Right. There was once upon a time, well, I look back, I was an early customer on New Zealand’s mobile networks and I remember being able to call up and you get somebody instantly and that gives you as much time as you wanted and so on. But these days when we’ve got, you know, literally, you know, millions of connections, probably you know, more than what the population is in New Zealand. Right.

Paul Spain:
That’s a pretty serious thing to be able to provide great customer service to that sort of basic clients.

Kieran Byrne:
So we’ve set in a pretty ambitious goals around AI. You’ll hear Jason talk about wanting to be the most AI enabled telco in the world and really that’s just about. We just see the opportunity with this. Like AI is not going away. You know, you can be as skeptical as you like, but this is a trend that I’m adamant is going to absolutely transform the world. And we want to get on the front, front foot of that. The traditional, if you go and talk to any consultants about AI deployment, they’ll talk about call centers will be the, the primary one and that’s the like the big use case. We’ve, we’ve actually been using AI in our call centers for quite a long time time.

Kieran Byrne:
Whether it’s chatbots, whether it’s using large language models to synthesize call transcripts to understand root cause and drivers of calls. We’ve managed to decrease a million calls from our call center over the past few years based on the stuff that we’ve been doing. So we’ve made A lot of progress there. It’s actually probably other areas of the business that we’ve actually sort of accelerated in this latest version of the program and some examples of that. Our marketing teams are now using Writer.com and various tools to do marketing, copy, copywriting and had a huge amount of benefits. We’re talking seven figures now of benefits associated annual with the work that they’re doing there. I’ve talked about what we’re doing in the network. We’re really trying for autonomy.

Kieran Byrne:
So taking human decision making out of the loop and running the network in an automated way. We’ve reduced several million of annual power consumption based on smarter ways of running the radio network, turning down frequencies when customers aren’t on to certain windows of the time, understanding the load and then adjusting the site towards that in an automated way. And now we’re experimenting with what’s called self optimizing radio networks. So actually changing parameters in the network to optimize customer experience in real time and things like that. Other areas where there’s huge amount of value is like the software development life cycle. So we’re going through our big IT modernization program at the moment. So spending a lot of money on that and using AI as a means to do that much more efficiently. So that’s from generating business requirements.

Kieran Byrne:
So we’ve developed a tool in house where it captures PowerPoint presentations and transcripts from calls and confluence pages and puts that all together. And it’s got four agents that start talking to each other and piecing together business requirements in sort of a standard format. And, and what that’s done is that’s reduced the time it takes a business analyst from eight days to one day to produce a detailed business requirement. Then obviously the software actually engineering side of it and testing, we’re starting to experiment with that, which is really cool. So it’s really throughout our business we’re focusing on a sort of domain centric approach, working with really trusted partners in all those areas to really go deep. And then the next challenge after we’ve done that is how do we then start to stitch together across the business so that the agent who’s working in network, self optimizing the network or understanding customer experience can talk to the agent on the front line that’s dealing with a customer. And actually that agent to agent interaction is sort of the next interesting wave that everyone’s talking about and no one’s really cracked yet.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. That’s fascinating. I’m really curious how these things will evolve and how it all fits together. So. And I mean at times we automate things and it doesn’t necessarily, it’s not necessarily AI to do it. I mean how clear are those lines? Have you got a bunch of things that are automated but when you look at it, while it’s not really AI, it’s kind of, we’ve written some rules and other bits and pieces and how much of it is really more AI.

Kieran Byrne:
And that’s interesting because there’s obviously a scale of it. So there’s a basic, you know, automation that everyone’s done for a long time but then you do this and then we’ve sort of got the generative AI co pilots and tools that we’re using and then we’ve got the sort of agentic AI which is the almost replacing process or human function with a LLM engine that can actually perform actions as well. And so we’re doing things across that domain and within Telco you have to do a combination of all three. And on the Agentix side we’ve got, I think as of last week we’ve got about nine or 10 agents actually in production performing real tasks. In the business there’s a couple of customer interacting ones, which is more enterprise customers who can access information about their contract or cancel a mobile plan and things like that. So there’s. But it’s not like our main call center’s not driven by AI agents yet. That’s a bit of a leap into the future.

Kieran Byrne:
But we’ve got a few external facing ones mainly in the enterprise and business space. And then we’ve got a bunch of internal ones that are starting to do things internally like the software development life cycle one I mentioned. We’ve got a pipeline of dozens and dozens of these at the moment that are in various stages from concept through to actual testing at the moment. And we’re just really trying to push the boundaries of what we can do and what we can get into production and experiment with in the business all while we’re arming our people with copilots and tools and ChatGPT Enterprise and Microsoft Copilot and getting people to start to get used to using those large language models and everything they do as well. So yeah, it’s exciting. We’re trying to do a multi pronged approach but we’re going wide and going deep and it’s a lot of fun at the moment.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, and whose technology are you using to build these agents?

Kieran Byrne:
So there’s a few. So we’re using Salesforce Agent Force, so we’re going quite deep in that. And that technology’s rapidly evolving. Currently migrating all our base into Salesforce at the moment. So as we get further and further into that, we’ll get more use out of that. There’s other vendors we’re looking at like ServiceNow, SAP that are all doing agentic technology as well. We’re working with AWS using Bedrock and Agents on top of that, which is pretty exciting as well. And then some of our big radio and network vendors like the Nokias and the Ericssons and things like that are all starting to experiment with this technology too.

Kieran Byrne:
So we’re trying to pick in each of those different areas of the business who’s the right partner to work with. And you’re seeing what benefits we can get out of these tools. But we’re very much out of the box. We don’t want to, we’re not in the business of developing models or anything like that. We want to take the capability that others provide and be able to rapidly scale that within our business.

Paul Spain:
Yep. Well, there’s a lot of work going on in that area. So if you can lean into what others are doing, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And I see that the, the government Chief Digital Officer has appointed an AI expert advisory panel. This is sort of just new news. And so they’ve got this panel of five from kind of across varying parts of the tech and business sector in New Zealand. How much difference does the government starting to take AI increasingly seriously? How do you think that that will play out? Is that pretty important for us as a country?

Kieran Byrne:
I was actually quite positively taken back by that, seeing that take place because in my mind the best thing the government could do right now is to almost replicate what Jason’s done for government and go, we want to be the most AI first government in the world. It would be such an amazing productivity driver for the country, a training ground for people. Imagine if being a government worker was about being really tech savvy and AI first versus what it is, you know, is now. Yeah. And like I would just love, you know, Chris Luxon to stand up there and go, we’re going to be the most AI first government. We’re going to digitize all our major entities, put in some forward thinking CEOs and CTOs within those organizations and just digitize the hell out of them. Work with partners to do that. Solve the problem, you know, identity challenge.

Kieran Byrne:
So New Zealanders can have one identity across multiple government agencies and those things and just move. Focus on productivity. And that’s. They talk about productivity a lot. And I think this could be one way to really drive it home would be let’s digitize the New Zealand government. But yeah, so I’m happy to see that. And I mean the proof’s in the pudding about how fast you can move and everything’s easier said than done in government obviously. But I think it’s a positive step.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, look, you know, I think it is, it’s really important that we, you know, we keep moving on these fronts. I think there’s a, there’s a balance in terms of, you know, what the regulatory, you know, frameworks are that support these things and you know, how we take advantage but we don’t kind of end up putting ourselves in a position where we end up kneecapping ourselves, you know, later as governments change and so on. And you know, you see, I guess some countries that end up with social scoring and surveillance systems and so on that rely on what generally looks like really ideal and brilliant technology, but then if you turn the knobs in different directions, you potentially come up with some odd outcomes. So I think we’ve got to make sure we build in those checks and balances as well. Right.

Kieran Byrne:
But I was hearing the other day about gaming government entity which shall remain nameless, which was in the year 20 of their IT transformation. Doesn’t sound like a transformation. That just sounds like bau.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah.

Kieran Byrne:
And I think getting some urgency and being really thoughtful around where you could push digitization of government just could have so many flow on benefits and it would start to also, I guess, drag through the infrastructure that’s needed in New Zealand as well and the right investment and networks and data centers and power and all that sort of stuff to support that as well.

Paul Spain:
Now one of the areas that I think has really caught people’s attention has been Starlink in recent years both in terms of suddenly this sort of ubiquitous access to connectivity in places where you’ve never been able to get access before in terms of, you know, a dedicated connection, but also that, that starting to come into, you know, the mobile world with sort of satellite to mobile. How, how’s that journey going for, for one NZ with, with Starlink, with, with SpaceX and, and Musk. You know, I, I always find that, you know, whenever the Musk’s name comes out, it seems to be, you know, quite polarizing for, you know, for a whole range of reasons. But you know, not the least of, you know, what’s been going on politically in recent times and so on. But I mean the technology just seems astounding but of course there are, you know, there are others who are trying to work in this space as well. What’s your view on the sort of the progress and how quick that you expect it to keep moving?

Kieran Byrne:
Yes, it’s been a really exciting journey for us, being first in the world to deploy a new technology like direct to satellite texting. I think as an organization, one NZ has always sort of pride itself on its ability to innovate. First 3G, first to 4G, first to 5G, and now in New Zealand and now first in the world to launch the service solved a huge amount of technical challenges with the Starlink team in order to get this in place. We beat T Mobile, much to their disgust. But that was good and it’s been really an amazing service and just an amazing sort of safety play as well. That’s where we see it’s 40% of New Zealand at the moment is not covered by terrestrial mobile coverage. And we’re a nation of outdoors people and boaties. And so having a technology solution like this to cover those gaps and ensure people are safe is pretty cool.

Kieran Byrne:
We’ve got it deployed now to hundreds of thousands of customers. There’s tens of thousands of messages being sent on a daily basis now through the network. And yeah, we just see this as a nice complimentary part of our, our integrated network that will continue into the future. So it’s only texting at the moment, but we’ve just launched an IoT product at Field days recently and we’re going to very soon we’ll move to a database product as well, where you’re able to use data on certain apps, which also potentially allow voice over IP calling as well through the network. So we’re really excited about it. We’ve just launched our network trial which allows customers of other networks to put a second ESIM on their phone and try the the SpaceX director satellite service. And we’re seeing really good interest in uptake both across enterprise and consumer consumers, which is great.

Paul Spain:
Now, I saw the announcement around field days and using Starlink for IoT Internet of Things type service, what does that actually look like? What is it that you’re able to deliver at this point in time?

Kieran Byrne:
This means we can deliver IoT in areas we couldn’t couldn’t before. So previously, where you need your terrestrial mobile connection to be able to talk to an IoT device, whether it’s a sensor on a farm or any sort of typical IoT device, you can now do that in an area that doesn’t have terrestrial coverage. So Rather than talking to the cell tower, it’s going to talk to the satellite and it just comes back into our network. So it’s just a more seamless way to grow your IoT base. There’s a lot of rural and agricultural applications for IoT and this just opens up other parts, more parts of the country to be able to deploy those solutions, more efficient agriculture and farming.

Paul Spain:
And so this is a data type service that’s sort of sporadically available when the.

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah. So IOT is typically pinging a bit of data periodically to some telemetry from some device or sensor. And this just means you can do that in 40% of the country. You couldn’t do it before, which is pretty cool. And a seamless approach where it’s not two different networks, it’s one set of devices talking to the same network but just through different means. Signal coming through a satellite or through a mobile tower. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
And does that make a big cost difference to organizations that are using it compared to if they’re in a normal cell coverage area? Cause obviously it’s got a cost to you to deliver that, to deliver that service that’s different to where it’s utilising your own towers.

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah, no, it’s not a dramatic. Obviously pricing’s based on the application and the amount of data that’s transferred, but for really data light applications, people aren’t going to see a massive difference in pricing across that. So it’s just an opportunity to I guess open up IOT to just other areas of the country that haven’t previously had it, which is. Which is pretty cool.

Paul Spain:
And where are you seeing the sort of immediate interest in terms of the use cases?

Kieran Byrne:
Is there farming sector? I don’t want to say too much about specific things because it’ll reveal who.

Paul Spain:
Those you don’t want to reveal.

Kieran Byrne:
But there’s a lot of farming and agricultural applications for it, which are pretty cool.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I guess, you know, that’s an area where the agritech world, where New Zealand obviously has some good capabilities and we want to continue to be winning on the global stage on that front. So it’s nice export sector for us.

Kieran Byrne:
So how do we be more productive and farm more efficiently? And this is something that helps that that’s good.

Paul Spain:
And I guess in terms of getting to a point where people could have continuous connectivity for whether it’s audio calls or web browsing or social media and so on. I saw something quite recently was suggesting maybe T mobile in the States would have that more kind of expanded capability, maybe as soon as sort of October this year type of timeframe, are you very much reliant on the same things they are? It comes down to the number of. Of satellites that SpaceX have put up so that you’ve got the gaps kind of filled in, so you move to a continuous coverage type of approach.

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah, there’s probably a couple of constraints and they’re similar across the board. And one is obviously the technology on the satellites being ready to achieve that, and the other one is the device manufacturers and the firmware as well being able to support new products. So essentially Apple and Samsung doing what they need to do at their end to allow apps to work from a perspective or IP calling and things like that. So we’re working on the same things that T Mobile’s working on and it’ll be relatively similar timeframes, but those get.

Paul Spain:
Solved probably a lot quicker knowing that they’re trying to get us coverage, not just trying to focus on New Zealand.

Kieran Byrne:
That’s good. We do a lot of experience sharing with the other. So Telstra’s launched now kddi T Mobile. There’s a lot of experience sharing between those technical teams to solve some of these problems with the Starlink team as well.

Paul Spain:
And there was talk of some sort of roaming capability for those that maybe have one NZ service here you go to Australia or US and so on. Is that something that’s. Where’s that at the moment?

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah, I think it’s the intention from Starlink to enable that at some point. It’s not working at the moment and it hasn’t been enabled, but yeah, that’s certainly an intention, is to be able to do that, which would be great for consumers.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So when would you pick that we might be able to make phone calls or at least have reasonably continuous kind of data service in New Zealand. Do you think that T Mobile date was maybe a little optimistic?

Kieran Byrne:
Oh, yeah, I think I’d be optimistic by the end of the year we’d be able to support certain Data applications and IP calling, WhatsApp calling, Facebook calling, things like that.

Paul Spain:
Are there more complexities to, I guess traditional mobile calling in terms of the technicalities versus say, WhatsApp or a messenger type call. How different are those from a. A perspective of being able to make them work seamlessly?

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah, it is just different technology and even like handing over between the satellite network and the terrestrial networks, there’s some challenges in there to be worked through. You need ubiquitous coverage, really, to make that a seamless thing, so you can’t have gaps between the satellites. So, yeah, there’s a few things to work through on the voice side, but I have no doubt they’ll be solved very quickly, the rate that the stuff’s changing. And, yeah, very soon, customers will be able to make voice calls over satellite from those areas.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, amazing. Now, tell us about the Doppler effect. Some of our listeners won’t have heard of this, but we were chatting about it before we started. What is the Doppler effect?

Kieran Byrne:
So it still blows my mind that a satellite traveling at 27,000 kilometers an hour, 250 kilometers above your head is talking to a standard mobile handset through our normal spectrum. And one of the big engineering challenges that SpaceX needed to solve was the Doppler effect, where the typical way they teach this in school is when the police car’s coming down the road at you and you hear a certain frequency, as soon as it’s past you, it’s a different frequency because the frequency of that sound waves change depending whether it’s coming towards you or moving away. So it shifts as there’s a relative movement between the thing that’s making the noise and the thing that’s taking the noise. Same problem with radio waves with those satellites. They, they traverse across the horizon. So where you can see the horizon to the other side in probably less than two minutes. So coming at an incredible rate relative to where you are. And so the radio signal, if they were just pushing out a 1800 megahertz radio signal, then that’s going to change depending whether it’s coming towards you or moving away from you.

Kieran Byrne:
And they’ve managed to somehow solve that engineering challenge. So from the perspective of the ground you’re receiving on that same frequency, no matter where that satellite is. So it’s pretty amazing that they’ve. They’ve solved a challenge like that, because that’s probably one of the biggest barriers to getting this technology working.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Oh, well, we’re glad that they’ve been working away in solving these challenges in the background. And talk to us a little bit about the ongoing expansion of 5G, what’s happening with the sun setting of 3G, how that looks, because we, I think every year you kind of. We hear something around, oh, there was this many million put into mobile network for one telco or another, I think sort of $100 million type figures on an annual basis.

Kieran Byrne:
That’s a lot of money.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, it’s a lot of money. But this kind of seems to be the ongoing part of the puzzle. So what does that look like for. For one NZ.

Kieran Byrne:
So I feel a bit as an industry we don’t get the credit we deserve for the sheer amount of increase in capacity and data we give people every year for the same prices. Our prices certainly don’t increase at the rate consumption increases. So we, you know, as technology’s evolved over the past 30 years, since mobile networks have been around people’s use, data is just absolutely transformed today where we’re streaming high definition 4K video on a mobile device and it just works. So we invest a lot every year to keep up with that changing technology and changing demand. We used to see mobile growth increasing at probably 60% a year in terms of data used. It’s starting to ramp off now. You can see in more advanced economies it’s getting down to the 20, 20% or lower. And really that’s just about.

Kieran Byrne:
We get saturation when video, you can’t really consume more data than video because what’s it going to be? But we’re still obviously every year keeping up with that capacity growth and making sure our network evolves to deliver that. We’re also rolling out 5G which brings a whole lot of new capabilities into mobile and really that’s about preparing us for this AI revolution. The capabilities that you get through modern 5G standalone networks are going to support all these sort of new use cases around autonomous vehicles and drones and 360 degree cameras and quality of service slices and all these things that are going to require a new way of thinking about connectivity. So we’re preparing ourselves for that at the moment and spending huge amount of Money getting that 5G network ready for this wave which will happen in the next few years. Another important part of that is the shutdown of the 3G network. And we’re not doing that to upset people or to cause problems, but we need that spectrum back. We need that spectrum because it’s got hardly anyone on it now and we need to get it back so we can put it on 5G so we can make the most of the new 5G capabilities. And as we’ve signaled to New Zealand that we’re planning on shutting down our 3G network at peak end of this year and we’re currently doing a lot of work in the background to get ready to do that and make sure customers, devices who aren’t 4G capable are migrated in time and coverage holes are closed and all those sort of things that we need to do that.

Kieran Byrne:
Luckily other countries have gone through this journey already, like Australia’s gone through it, went through a bit of pain, have A lot of learnings from it. We talk to those telcos often and have captured the learnings from those situations. So we’re hoping we can make it a quite a seamless experience. But just a really important thing to do from a efficiency, security and spectrum reuse plan. So, yeah, we need to push through that as an industry.

Paul Spain:
How far through sort of growing your 5G coverage are you? What percentage of your coverage is at 5G now?

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah, so we’re in the 60s now. And part of that 3G switch off will allow us to rapidly increase that as we free up some more spectrum. That allows us to sort of propagate that signal a bit further. So we’re still rolling out pretty fast and we’ll have in the next couple of years the majority of people in the country covered by really good 5G signal with new set of advanced capabilities that are going to allow us to make the most of all these new AI and innovative things that are coming.

Paul Spain:
Now for folks that maybe they’re stuck in a location where all they get is through 3G coverage right now, what’s that transition going to look like for them? And is Everywhere that’s got 3G today going to be covered?

Kieran Byrne:
Technically now we have no sites in our network that are 3G only. So everywhere there is 3G, there should also be what’s called a low band 4G signal. To cover that entire area. We need to continue to optimize the network and make sure that the propagation of the 4G signal matches the 3G. Interesting. One of the biggest problems I had in Australia was as the load on the 3G network reduced, as they migrated people from the devices, the range of the 3G signal propagated further and actually went beyond the maps that they had on their website.

Paul Spain:
I experienced some sort of iteration of that when I was first trying to test the Starlink coverage and didn’t want to go for a two hour drive in order to do so.

Kieran Byrne:
I’d be like, you kept going and going and going.

Paul Spain:
I’m out of coverage here. And it’s like, I’m still getting your 3G or you know, some sort of signal there.

Kieran Byrne:
So 3G has this great property that when it’s underloaded, it actually opposite, when it’s more loaded, it shrinks.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, okay.

Kieran Byrne:
And so we set up our maps around that. And the mistake Australia Australian radio teams made is they designed their 4G signal around their 3G maps and so they had all these bits on the edges where there was 3G signal, which they didn’t even know existed that people relied on and they turned it off all at once. They turned the whole network off in one day. And everyone went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, there’s a, there’s a problem here. And so it’s great to capture that learning now without us doing it, because we can be much more thoughtful around ensuring that that 4G coverage propagates a bit further, ensuring that we shut down the network in a measured way and so we don’t flick everything off at once and go, let’s see what happens. It’s a much more thoughtful approach and if there are gaps, we can fix them and optimize them on the time and then move on to the next area.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, okay. So I was in part of Blockhouse Bay recently and sort of, you know, down at, you know, sea level, I guess, and. But yeah, in a particular, I guess, particular area where, yeah, you wouldn’t get too much access to different sites unless there was one, I guess, reasonably nearby. I’m picking from the way the bays are and so on, but I only saw 3G, so that’ll be one. I guess it’ll be on your radar.

Kieran Byrne:
And it will be as well. There’s rules built in which said if the 3G signal is this sort of strength relative to the 4G signal, you might still get 3G, but when that 3G signal goes, you’ll still get 4G as well. So there’s some nuances to it. It doesn’t mean just because there’s 3G there that you won’t get 4G when it turns it off. So this is what we’re working through and we’re really committed to make this work well because we know it’s a painful transition. Unfortunately, things like at the moment, certain retailers still parallel importing 3G only phones and selling them and it’s just not who. Yeah, I won’t name any names.

Paul Spain:
No, I, I did see. Yeah, there’s been some media coverage around that sort of parallel importing of devices. And then I guess that creates a situation where either the retailer under Consumer Guarantees act is needing to make good and potentially provide a different device, or they’ve got to work in behind the scenes and try and, you know, get some firmware updates or work with yourselves and maybe spark in two degrees to try and get some of these devices to.

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah, so the devices themselves will never be compatible. They actually need to get rid of them. The other problem, which is even, which is a bit more concerning is 4G compatible and even VoLTE calling compatible 4G devices, some of them won’t make emergency calls on the other networks. So, you know, you can make an emergency call on the Spark network or the 2degrees network when you’re out of one NZ coverage. Some of these imported phones, even though they’re volte calling or 4G calling compatible, won’t make emergency calls. And so we know them, we know what the devices are. And it’s really important that people text the. It’s 550.

Kieran Byrne:
Text 3G to 550 to understand whether the device is compatible or not. And you’ll get feedback back. And yeah, we’re trying to. We contact people continuously about this. We send them text messages warning them about it. And yeah, and yeah, we need to make sure we follow through and get those devices out of the network. Right, okay.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. Cause I was reading around a situation where I think it was pbtech. They imported a range of devices that obviously probably hadn’t come through the carrier type of channel. And their suggestion was, hey, we’ll get a software update, we’re gonna work with telcos, and this should all be solved by the end of the period. But your feeling is if they’re not working now, they’re probably not gonna be able to.

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah, they’re not compatible with spectrum bands that are on.

Paul Spain:
Okay, so they might not actually support the rights. Yeah.

Kieran Byrne:
Regardless of what software goes on there, it doesn’t mean they’re gonna work on 4G.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, okay.

Kieran Byrne:
Okay.

Paul Spain:
So it might not be as easy as what’s been suggested.

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah, there is a whole lot of IoT devices out there as well, which are on 3G as well, which need to be migrated to.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And are you seeing that the messages is kind of, you know, getting through? I remember there was, you know, alarm system that, you know, we need to get put in. And the. Yeah, the provider was saying, oh, well, yeah, this, you know, comes with a, you know, GPRS option. This is going back a little while. Or he just said a cellular connection. Right. And then I asked a few more questions and it’s like, oh, 2G, this could be a problem.

Paul Spain:
And so I guess in these sort of different fields where these technologies are used, the word gets around reasonably quickly and folks get in and offer upgrades. But there will be cases where people probably have to rip out some technology more than just replacing out a board. You’ve got to actually get rid of a whole system because it’s just archaic and can’t be upgraded. Right.

Kieran Byrne:
And what they saw in Australia was actually, you know, no one moved and they sent the messages and sent them, you know and it was, they were expecting this nice linear line of people migrating up to there and it was a hockey stick. So at the end when people really have to, they, they do it. And it gave me a bit more confidence because I think I was more worried about that device migration than the coverage aspect. Whereas their lived experience was the coverage aspect was the pain point and the device migration was actually okay. But we’re here to work with all our customers to get whoever needs to get across to a device. So yeah, I just encourage people as much as they can to make the move, make the move early, to make it less painful and yeah, because it’s, it’s ultimately going to get a better result if we can build a high quality 5G network for the, the country. Yeah but this is a painful process we need to go through.

Paul Spain:
How long would you anticipate we need to have? Because we were used to you know, always having, you know, I guess, yeah, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G came, you know, came along. We’ve, you know, we’re down to three, we’ll be down to having two with just 4G and 5G. You know, do you foresee that in the kind of the 6G time frame which you know I’m picking is roughly sort of 2030 that 4G would be coming up and getting switched off earlier or we’re probably a decade, a decade out for you know, of life left in 4G at this stage.

Kieran Byrne:
I can’t imagine 4G will be shut off until the mid-2030s I wouldn’t have thought. And yeah, it’s a great technology that still from a bandwidth perspective can deliver majority of consumer grade use cases and yeah, I think we’ll find it’s around for a long time.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, okay. Yep, yep. And towers, where have the towers gone?

Kieran Byrne:
Still there. Just don’t own them anymore.

Paul Spain:
It seems like they’re off your books now.

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah. So it’s been three years ago there was a wave of tower sales amongst the industry. Spark 2 degrees and us as well. Two tower cos that are there now, Conexa and 40 South. So it’s part of a trend that’s happened globally around infrastructure monetization. And yeah, I think it’s really about a reflection that telcos are sort of this collection of these sort of different asset classes that have different risk profiles and different return profiles combined with a retail business and stores and all these sort of things and it’s sort of this mix of businesses and if you can split that up and invest in these things in an appropriate way. You can actually get a lot of value out of them. And we’ve seen some amazing things since we’ve sold the towers to 40 south that they’re doing in there.

Kieran Byrne:
And the way they’re thinking about it and optimising that business and lobbying for higher height towers so we can have more efficient coverage. Thinking about how you can stack multiple sets of antennas on light poles, how you can simplify the engineering, how we can drive efficiency through digital twins and drone surveys of sites rather than sending people out, all this sort of stuff is when you’ve got a set of people dedicated on a set of assets, they tend to optimize that where when it was in house with us, it’s just one of the things we have to deal with and it’s a bit of an afterthought. And you know, the process around negotiating with landlords on leases and having a proper team around that who thinks about that and optimises that there’s a lot of value to be driven by, you know, carving up those assets into entities that can focus on them. And we’ve done the same with our fibre. Now we recently launched E on Fiber, which is a separate standalone dedicated fiber optic business. Which referred to reflects the fact that fiber’s cool again now with the AI revolution and we need a whole lot more of it and the data center growth. And we want an organization that has a level of independence that it can work with everyone. And we’re the second largest fiber owner in the country after Chorus.

Kieran Byrne:
So yeah, just another move to create a structure that really optimizes the value of those assets?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s great. Just trying to think what else. There’s a lot of things we could tap into. Anything else that’s on your mind, Karen, that we haven’t dived into, you think might be of interest to listeners?

Kieran Byrne:
No, I think it’s just a fascinating time in the industry. I think this sort of intersection of wireless connectivity move to the cloud and AI just makes Telco a really interesting place to be at the moment. And we’ve delivered the same service, we put everyone through the same pipe for the past 30 years and now we’re moving to a world where we need all these different applications to support all these new services and ideas and businesses that are popping up and it’s gonna be a really interesting transformational time. And yeah, it’s a lot of fun at the moment and there’s a lot coming and really interesting.

Paul Spain:
One thing that it’s kind of kept coming up over time is, well, isn’t there a time we won’t need cell towers anymore? Because look, there’s ubiquitous sort of satellite coverage. My thinking when I’ve had that question is, well, there’s only kind of so far that, you know, satellite connectivity can penetrate. So that to me doesn’t seem like something. I don’t know if that would ever be viable. What are your thoughts on. Can there be a point where Starlink are their own mobile carrier and they’re competing with everyone else and there’s no, you know, they don’t have any, you know, local, local towers? Is that, that type of thing, a possibility in some form?

Kieran Byrne:
I mean, I couldn’t sit here and say it’s not a possibility at some point in the future. The, I mean, it’s a. The physical distance provides engineering challenges and there’s definitely physics limitations of delivering that sort of stuff from space. And latency as well. I mean, latency is going to become a huge thing in a new AI world. And so the physical distance that something has to propagate through there is going to add latency to connections. The bandwidth associated with being 250km away at the moment is just not even in the near ballpark. So I definitely see it if I take a 10 to 20 year view.

Kieran Byrne:
It’s a complimentary technology. Like it’s gonna augment our network. It’s gonna be for certain use cases. You’re not gonna necessarily be streaming 4K video in the middle of the bush anytime soon, but you’ll be able to make a voice call, you’ll be able to text, you’ll be able to check your email, you’ll be able to maybe watch a low definition Netflix. But yeah, it’s hard to foresee in the near future it could be a replacement for terrestrial networks. Just the sheer capacity and bandwidth that we need to run the modern technology.

Paul Spain:
We’re used to streaming video and being able to move things around pretty swiftly. Right. And that’s gonna be dramatically limited in terms of what we get on a mobile device over a Starlink type of connection.

Kieran Byrne:
And there’s some other interesting things to think about. Cause that would be giving your network infrastructure to another country essentially. There’s no way you could ever create a case to create a New Zealand LEO network where these satellites fly around the world in 90 minutes and then two minutes of that they’re over.

Paul Spain:
They’re over in New Zealand. Right? Yeah.

Kieran Byrne:
So you’re inherently relying on a global party for the scale needed to do that in an efficient way and would we really hand over all our communications to another country rather than having. And so, yeah, there’s certain barriers to it, I think. I’m not going to sit here and naively say it’s never going to. There’s never going to be a technology that allows us to. But you know, in my window, and if I’m talking sort of 10 or 20 years, I think it’s a fantastic complementary technology, but certainly not a, not a disruptor in the sense it could completely disintermediate a terrestrial telca.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And particularly in a country like New Zealand where the towers and the infrastructure and so on is already out there. You know, I guess if you, I don’t know, you know, pick somewhere in the world that has, you know, no mobile networks yet and I don’t think there probably are any, but. Or there will be regions where there’s very limited and there would be some, you know, some scenarios like that where I can imagine you could come up with a, you know, with a particular use case as the technology develops. But yeah, probably 99% of cases. Yeah, things will kind of continue.

Kieran Byrne:
It’s going to be fantastic for consumers. You know, at some point in the future we’re going to have all telco networks, we’ll have a satellite partner and connectivity will be ubiquitous no matter where you are. And yeah, that’s obviously a massive, massive leap.

Paul Spain:
And for those that are sort of curious, the difference between the LEO low Earth orbit satellites and then the geostationary satellites. The geostationary satellites are a lot further out, aren’t they?

Kieran Byrne:
36,000 kilometers, I think.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. So that totally kind of changes the realities of, of what’s actually possible and what’s doable. And the LEO satellites are moving around, so yeah, you’ve got.

Kieran Byrne:
Yeah, so that physical distance makes quite a big difference in that.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, that’s great. Oh, well, thank you very much, Kieran. Real privilege to have you on the New Zealand Tech podcast and yeah, we’ll certainly look forward to next time. Big, big thank you, of course, to One NZ, Spark, 2degrees, Workday, HP and Gorilla Technology for their support of the New Zealand Tech Podcast. And thank you for listening in. We will be back again next week with another episode and of course, if you’re listening to this on your favourite podcast app, do make sure you’re following us across your video and social media apps so you can get access to the video that we often share as well. That’s us. Thank you very much.

Kieran Byrne:
Thanks, Paul.

Paul Spain:
All right. Cheers, Kieran.