Telstra and Starlink take on NBN, Zuck’s Threads takes on Elon’s Twitter: Vertical Hold Ep 436

Adam Turner 

I’m Adam Turner. And this week I’m not joined as usual by Mr. Alex I’d rather be in Japan Kidman because well, he’s in Japan, bastard. So while Alex eats his bodyweight and okonomiyaki and mini Godzilla reconnects with his roots. It’s time to smash the glass and break out the emergency Kidman. It’s Finder’s Angus Kidman Welcome back to the show. Where would you rather be right now?

Angus Kidman 

Well, just sticking to the biases that all Kidmans have for overseas travel, I would like to be in Stockholm enjoying a nice Swedish summer, some nice Swedish food some late nights, some good looking people and just general good times, and a bit of Abba of course, naturally,

Adam Turner 

naturally. So speaking of adventures this week, Telstra has struck a deal with Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service to deliver faster broadband to the back of Bourke. We’ll get to that in a minute. But first, it looks like the cage fight between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk is on.

Angus Kidman 

Yeah, and you say cage fight like a metaphor as it often is in social media. But this is a proposal for an actual cage fight because this is how idiotic these two men are. There was basically a joking comment that was made between the two of them on social media on Twitter, I think there might be the last two people commenting on Twitter. First of all, yeah, let’s have a cage right there, like name the venue. And now the UFC has got involved, and they’re both seriously exploring the idea that they’re going to have an actual cage fight because they want to prove that even though we thought that these were like the two biggest douche bros in tech, they can do throw it to a whole additional level. Who are you going to back in this fight? Adam, who do you think is going to win? At first

Adam Turner 

glance, you’d have to say Musk because he just looks like a bit of a scrapper and he’s got the weight advantage. But Zuckerberg actually got some training, hasn’t it?

Angus Kidman 

Yeah, so Zuckerberg has done a bunch of jujitsu training. So and this was this was his pandemic thing while the rest of us like you did jigsaws and got fat, he decided to log into jujitsu, and let my company ran down, apparently. So you’d have to think he’s got more skills on that he has got the age advantage, Musk has come out and his big move is the walrus, which still lie on top of somebody. So it reminds me a lot there was a storyline in Friends, where Monica’s billionaire boyfriend decided he want to become the ultimate fighter. Yes. And she dumped him because he was being such an idiot. And look, obviously, the best outcome that we could get out of this would be if the two of them managed to fatally injure each other and they both died. But sadly, I don’t know that that’s gonna happen.

Adam Turner 

Yes, I think Musk would be the I don’t know karate, but I know crazy kind of guy. Very, so Well, the tech bros. You know, still talking about duking it out in person. Zuckerberg’s Instagram has taken a big swing and Elon’s Twitter this week, what’s the story?

Angus Kidman 

So yeah, we’ve heard these rumours for a while that Meta wanted to come out with a Twitter rival. And we knew that it was probably going to be called Threads. And now we know it’s basically going to be out this week, we’ve seen a listing for it show up on the app store for iPhones, we saw it very briefly on Google Play, but that disappeared much more quickly. But it looks like if you’re an Instagram user, some people will be able to sign up the threads, start using their identity and start using what is basically going to be Instagram. But with text and people replying to you, which when you think about it, that’s basically Twitter. This is people expressing their opinions, other people replying to them, anyone can follow along, and anyone can join in. So after a lot of discussion of this, it seems like your Meta has decided this is the moment to strike. Let’s try and get something out there. Let’s see if we can just get one more dominant social platform, because apparently having Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp isn’t enough for some people.

Adam Turner 

And there’s a there’s a lot of little new startups picking at maybe it’s too soon to say the carcass of Twitter, there’s a lot of them that can see that, that that opportunity. If you’ve got your Mastodons on, you’ve got your Bluesky, none of them have got anywhere near the clout that threat could have do they?

Angus Kidman 

No because thread has two advantages here. The first is it has bucketloads of Facebook money. So it’s got all this cash. So while it’s building up an audience, it doesn’t have to make money out of the second is it’s got this built in audience or there’s people who are already using Instagram in particular, and who they can just say hey, why don’t you give this a try, you can keep the same identity it will be tied in is another way for you to gain followers. So they’ve got a potential traction advantage, which is much bigger than any of the new scrappy startups who as good as they are for either technical reasons or policy. Reasons, it’s just very hard to build an app. And if these things take off, it’s very hard to run the infrastructure. There are plenty of problems that meta has. But you’d have to say in recent years, it hasn’t had a problem with keeping up with managing its users and making sure the service is available. So it probably is the most significant threat that we’ve seen to Twitter, certainly in the Musk era, and probably, honestly, for a good four or five years before that.

Adam Turner 

And as you say, one of the advantages here is that you don’t have to go through a long signup process. And you don’t have to quibble over usernames, because I would assume whatever your Instagram username is, you’ve automatically got dibs on that on threads as well. So it’s a much smoother transition, then when you get there, you know who people are because they’re using the same usernames from the other platforms?

Angus Kidman 

Absolutely. I think the question is, and what will be interesting, and we don’t know, just because the platform hasn’t come out yet. One question that raises as well. How tightly integrated will they be? Because they are different things. People who go on Instagram, typically, they want to see pictures, we saw that even when Instagram started trying to emphasise video, but lots of Instagram users that was a big no, no, that was the moment of oh, no, hang on. No, I came onto here to see things. And yeah, if you’re not letting me see things, that’s going to be problematic. So I think balancing that will be important, they want to make it attractive to people, but they don’t want to put off people who came onto the platform for what it originally was. It also represents a really fundamental shift in the Instagram approach. Because Instagram, you can write a text screen next to your photo, and that can be quite long, and it’d be filled with hashtags. But you can’t put a link in it. I don’t think you can possibly be a competitor to Twitter, if you don’t let people put links into things because that is the very essence of Twitter, Twitter, let us share other kinds of media and you can put video on there. And you can put images, but the reality is, is the link is the thing that matters. And I’m gonna be really interested to see what kind of constraints Netta puts on that what kind of tracking it puts on that, whether it tries to render that in its own little unique view and take some stuff off it because that’s been something it’s been very humbling to do with Instagram. And within that environment. I think that’s an interesting switch. We’ll have to see what that looks like when it launches. And if it may change their mind once they start testing this rollout.

Adam Turner 

I would also imagine it’s not a coincidence that they’re launching this thing now. They’ve kind of waited till Twitter’s on its knees, haven’t they?

Angus Kidman 

Yeah, so I think there’s there’s a sense of going okay, we didn’t have to do this earlier. But they do need to do something. There’s no doubt but yeah, meta as a company has taken a fairly comprehensive reputational and market flogging because it has a an ageing user base for its main products. It seems to be investing all this money in a Metaverse that literally nobody except Mark Zuckerberg cares about. And so it doesn’t even demonstrate, hey, we have a great strategy, because there’s not a growth strategy for Facebook. It’s a massively profitable application. But there’s no growth strategy there. I don’t know how anyone makes money out of WhatsApp, I just it’s a great product, but it doesn’t do anything. Instagram probably has a younger profile, but similar challenges around how do you really monetize in that space? So if they needed to do it, but yes, they’ve reached the point where it’s like, wow, Twitter really isn’t the doldrums we’ve had long enough to go, okay, it didn’t die, the minute mass took over, which was probably never going to happen. But it’s been through a steady decline, it’s getting worse and worse. Now is the time for strike. And just when Twitter’s not dead, and people haven’t given up on the idea of doing a text based thing at all, let’s get in and do that. So yeah, I don’t think there’s any coincidence about the announcement timing, and even the fact that they kind of basically leaked it by putting on the App Store, knowing full well, that obsessive techie journalists like ourselves will always get a no.

Adam Turner 

And most of the Twitter’s problems at the moment are self inflicted.

Angus Kidman 

Well, if by self inflicted, you mean, yeah, Elon said, Do this, and they all had to do it, then yes, they absolutely self inflicted, there’s a bunch of dumb things they’ve had to do. The most recent that’s sort of gone over the last week has been this obsession with oh, we have to write limit everybody, we can’t let you see all the tweets you might want to see. So we’re gonna say that after you’ve seen a set number of tweets of the day, that’s it and this number briefly was 600, then it was 1000. We don’t know what it is now. But it’s still limited. You have to be signed to Twitter to see Twitter now, which didn’t used to be the case. So that made that harder. And then on top of that, so that’s sort of messing up the casual user, if you’re dedicated users who like Twitter, they’ve decided to mess up TweetDeck, which is a big platform. So what are they wrecking? They’re out and what’s going wrong on the TweetDeck front?

Adam Turner 

Well, what the big thing that they’ve been saying for a while is that they want people to if you want to use TweetDeck, they want you to subscribe to Twitter, blue. And I think they’ve now come out and said officially, you’ve got 30 days to Subscribe to twitter, blue, or TweetDeck, doesn’t it? You can’t use TweetDeck TweetDeck already seems to be breaking for people now. And I think what they’re doing is they’re, they’ve had a preview version of a new preview of a new version of Twitter, I’m sorry, I’ve Tweet Deck, people will know often if you’re using a service, they come up with a new version, they don’t push you over to it straight away. They tell you hey, it’s there. And then eventually, like not shove, everybody’s gonna move over. So what they’re doing now is shoving everybody onto this new preview version, and it’s maybe not as seamless transition as they would like.

Angus Kidman 

And it’s a very speedy trade because you say It’s only 30 days normally, those kinds of product transitions, you give people Max, if not yet, to switch over, like, you know, even as much as we were sliding off somewhere like Microsoft or their windows transitions, they don’t force you off in 30 days, that’s not the way that it works. So yeah, they’ve kind of said that, and the general information from people who like using TweetDeck. And these tend to be needy professionals, people who want to follow a lot of things, a lot of accounts may post for a few different accounts. That is going even, that’s not worth putting the blue tick on there. So it seems unlikely that this is going to be the saving grace, maybe that’s the intention. Maybe they just don’t want to develop TweetDeck. And they just do a short version of it. Everyone leaves it, and then they abandoned the product. I mean, at this stage, I wouldn’t put anything past them in terms of strategy with quote, marks around it and a Zed instead of an S, because there’s no actual strategy going on. But yeah, it’s messy.

Adam Turner 

Will TweetDeck is the only, I mean, it’s still owned by Twitter, but it’s the only non Twitter client, you can now use to access Twitter, right?

Angus Kidman 

Yeah, because one of the results of doing this rate limiting and all the API’s work is that nobody else can write independent client for many services that relied on scraping Twitter to tell you things are actually breaking. And on what’s left at Twitter, you’ll see people saying, Hey, we were running a weather service telling people about cyclones. And we can’t do this anymore, because we can’t read the relevant data. So it really feels like it’s just part of this heading towards Well, the only people who want on here, the people who want to pay, and we’ll give them all the access. And what doesn’t work there is that nobody gets any meaningful interactions. Everyone starts looking to say, right, can I get on the mastodon? Can I go to the blue sky? And that’s the opportunity that threads is probably the best positioned to step into. But the question remains, is this a business? Twitter’s never been a business, it’s never been a profitable business. And that was true. Well, before Mass got involved, he’s accelerated that decline. But you can hardly say, Oh, wow, Twitter was taking off as an idea. It was, it was it had massive cultural impact, but as an actual profitable entity, not so much. So maybe all we’re going to prove by doing threads is that nobody can make money out of this kind of format, no matter how useful some of us might find it,

Adam Turner 

do you think for it to take off, because before they started to cut off that sort of API access to Twitter, one of the things that helped Twitter, from our professional marketing being used by corporations aspect was that you had these third party interfaces like TweetDeck, and other things, so you could manage it. You know, you could have a group of people managing it, you could schedule things, you weren’t just trying to do it through the consumer grade interface. The think that if something like a threads, or blue sky or anything else wants to take on that same level of being embraced by corporate users that it needs to offer some kind of either similar interface or be open, offer the API’s for some third party to do something similar? Yes, I

Angus Kidman 

think you need to offer a bit of both. I mean, ultimately, you need to offer the ability to manage those things and do what you want to do on the platform. And part of that is very much about controlling that. It’s also actually about how do you monetize it. And something I would have to reluctantly give me the credit for is if you want to spend money with Facebook, they make that process very easy. And they do give you a bunch of data to decide what you’re going to do. It’s very easy to go through the Facebook process and work out. I want to go for this audience in this country age this much, who like unicorns, and they can find that for you really quickly. That’s something that Twitter struggle with even Premax definitely struggles with now can’t get those premium advertisers. So yeah, if you’re looking for that professional audience who uses your platform, I would never bet against meta doing that, because they have a wealth of experience on that front on how to do that, even if they don’t fully open up to API’s, which on the whole meta hasn’t utilised to keep you in this environment. But you can’t say it’s a bad environment, they do a pretty good job of managing that they

Adam Turner 

do have that. I can’t remember what they call it, but that like their business grade interface that you can manage things from and shedule tweets and all those kinds of things and get the higher level of demographics and

Angus Kidman 

statistics. Yes, I think they understand they understand how to run this as a commercial business. And I think it’s hardly scandalous to say that that has not been evident at all on Twitter in the last year. And it gets noticed I was talking about this on Adelaide radio earlier in the week and talking to the producer. He’s like, I can’t believe the ads that I see on Twitter that you just don’t see any major brands there and you really don’t. And that’s as much a sign of the death knell as anything else. Because once you’ve lost those major advertisers, once they feel it’s unsafe, your chances of getting them back, you’ve got a really high hurdle to leap over there even higher than your chances of winning a cage match.

Adam Turner 

Well, Twitter seems to think that I’m interested in investing in gold. Why I keep seeing ads for that. And that is one thing as you say, Facebook is so uncanny. Its ability to predict the ads that you might want to see is what people might make people think all the time that their devices are listening to them because they can just pull stuff out. But it’s not always out of nowhere. It’s like it because it knows where you’ve been. It knows which shop you’ve been to. So They can really target you with stuff. And the contrast between that and whatever the hell Twitter’s trying to do is just really point out how badly Twitter have handled that idea of, you know, bringing in those that kind of targeted advertising, they would actually appeal to advertisers.

Angus Kidman 

Yeah, because same for me if I look at my Twitter, Reddit or gold, or weird products that I know I drop shippers in a plain plastic bag like that’s the entirety of my

Adam Turner 

squirrel on the nut that on the bird feeder that gets spun around, so I can watch that one all day. That one’s clever.

Angus Kidman 

It’s just similar with a cat that dives into the middle of a thing that is apparently going to wrestle with all day. I saw that one today, the cats are not doing that I promised speaking as the secondary keepin on cats, I still promise you cats and not doing their stuff like I found that very unpersuasive.

Alex Kidman 

Enjoying the show, that’s great. Don’t forget to subscribe, which you can do on every podcast platform you’ve ever heard of just search the vertical hold, or go to our website, vertical hold up Comdata. You, we have that handy button to every single podcast platform.

Adam Turner 

So as we’ve said over the years, our soup is euro is the NBN. We don’t talk about it quite as much as we used to. But it’s the thing that we keep coming back to. And there was big news, that’s kind of not exactly related to the NBN. But it’s going to impact the NBN this week, because two of its, let’s say biggest threats biggest rivals have decided to get into bed together, haven’t they? Yes,

Angus Kidman 

they have. And yeah, this was something we probably didn’t see coming. And when you think about you go I actually it makes sense. You can see what’s going on. We’ve had this announcement, Telstra said it has partnered with Starlink, the satellite based service owned by Elon Musk of Twitter fame, and they’re wrong. It will start reselling Starlink services in Australia, it’s the first telco to have done a deal like this and Starlink Stalins me very much about these are our satellites. These are our customers don’t get involved. So that in itself is noteworthy. But the way that Telstra is done it interesting, they said, Well, we’re going to sell these services, but we’re not just going to sell you the same Starlink, you could get if you went and signed up a Starlink yourself, we’re going to sell these bundled services. So they get to sell a style like voice only service. Let that sink in the notion that someone basically just wants to buy a landline from styling, because that is literally what they’re proposing. But also more than you’ll be able to buy a voice service plus a broadband service, which will be based on the existing styling setup. The reason why you might do this with Telstra, rather than just going straight to Eli and asking for it is they’re saying that they will have Installation Support and ongoing support. So rather than what currently happens if you get up to styling, and this has come up before on the show, when we’ve talked to people have used it is they basically send you a satellite dish and say, stick this on your roof and then find some software and see what happens. And, you know, realistically, for a lot of rural users, that’s no different than maintaining their pump or dealing with their soul. I said they’re not gonna be fazed by that. But some people will be they’re going to offer support on that. And they’re going to offer this voice element. And we sometimes forget that because because voice disappeared with 90% of the NBN. Because copper, well, if it didn’t disappear, it stopped being useful for it sort of went out the way that didn’t actually happen. If you’re in a satellite area, they kept that the copper in those areas, and to some extent, you’re still allowed by customer. So maybe you’re looking for alternatives. So yeah, there’s potentially some appeal there. But it’s this interesting thing, they’ve announced it, I haven’t announced much detail about whether it will happen other than this year or what they’ll charge, but it’s kind of it’s become Oh, suddenly, Telstra rather than trying to sell you broadband from the NBN. They’re now trying to sell you broadband essentially, from Elon and they’ve decided that that’s for their rural strategy, at least initially. That’s that’s what they come home with.

Adam Turner 

So the alternative if you’re in a rural area, and you’re reliant on satellite is to go with NBN Skymaster service can be resold by anybody because NBN is not their wholesaler, so you get it through an internet retailer. But not Telstra,

Angus Kidman 

but not and this is one of the fascinating things like it actually, this is in its own way, there are many criticisms of Skymaster how reliable the services that that you’ve had capsule resta. But one thing Skymaster did that none of the rest of the NBN did is it attracted new ISPs. So that service because when you look at the data for who sells NBN services, it is dominated by exactly the same brands who were selling stuff before the NBN existed. So it’s all Telstra, Optus, and what’s now TPG used to be on it. That hasn’t changed. One of the big goals for the NBN was, hey, let’s get a more diverse competitive marketplace. And if you judge them on the overall map at UK, well, that was an absolute failure didn’t happen. But it did happen with satellite while there are only roughly in the order of 100,000 satellite connections for Skymaster. So a very small percentage of the total. Telstra doesn’t do it. And the dominant brands are brands that you would never see anywhere else like their brands that if you’re a rural user, you’ll recognise them and if you’re not, you’ll go I have not heard of these people. So you’ve got sky mesh, you’ve got activate they’re the two sort of big players. Tp do a tight TPG to a tiny bit of a southern phone. Do it. Tell us He’s not involved at all Telstra has not got involved in this space. So it’s kind of ceded that rural broadband presence, essentially, to other providers. And this is a way of saying, well, we’ll do that. But we’re not going to do it by going with an NBN service, we’re going to go with something different. So I think it’s a interesting strategic play purely on that level. And imagine

Adam Turner 

anything would be more practical than putting up your own satellites.

Angus Kidman 

Well, I wouldn’t want to underestimate like putting up the satellite is not that complicated. I’ve known several people who’ve done it like it is not, it is not ridiculously difficult. But undoubtedly, there are people who would like to have the service who were just gonna go, that’s too hard for me. And this is actually this has been nice where these regional players have gotten into because they’re like, they’ll say, we are in this region, we’ll sort you out. We don’t mind if you have to drive time to come with us. But we’re going to set you up. And so there’s definitely an audience for that kind of stuff. And Telstra is saying we’re going to play in that space. Of course, this is Telstra, Telstra likes to be premium. You can’t imagine that’s going to be cheap. And Starlink is not cheap to start with that is an expensive service. When you add on a Telstra, hey, we’ve set it up for you and added voice thing, it is going to be considerably more expensive than Skymaster. I anticipate.

Adam Turner 

So if you put the two next to each other Starlink because it’s relying on low Earth orbit satellites. Basically, the distance between your house and the satellite is a lot smaller than an NBN satellite, because NBN has got two satellites that are really high and a cover in the whole country. Starlink is got a whole lot of satellites that are down low and constantly moving. But so the benefits are you get faster speeds, you get lower latency because it’s a quicker return trip. Also, they offer unlimited downloads. Downside is it’s a lot more expensive. But also Am I right in thinking that Starlink still has tiny drop outs as your handover from one little satellite to the other little satellite.

Angus Kidman 

Yeah, its intrinsic to the satellite that is just not as good as a Wi Fi connection. That is that’s physics, basically, you can’t get around it. So there’s no doubt that generally I Starlink will give you more for the money, but it’s still not guaranteed, you will still have patchiness and you will still have periods of peak demand that doesn’t disappear. When everyone’s sitting down at 8pm at night and trying to watch the latest new thing on Netflix or Paramount plus, or anything else that Mark is keen to tell us to get into in the next little moment. This is where we have to briefly mention presto, just to make sure that we’ve covered our contractual obligations. Yeah, you still have those problems. So it ain’t perfect. But if you can afford it, it’s you know, it’s potentially, you know, a better and more interesting service. So there’s scope for it. I do. I mean, I do wonder like Telstra doesn’t necessarily have the best reputation in the bush because they have had satellite services previously. And they were wildly expensive and very unreliable. So there’s probably in the same way that there are people who live in urban areas who go I wouldn’t touch that with a bargepole. I think they’ll get a little bit of that. But they’ll probably get some people who are like, No, that’s a brand over here, as I’ve seen. And that’s what’s in the payphone. It makes sense for Telstra to go more heavily after that market. And it makes sense to do it with a partner because the economics of deployments and satellites wouldn’t work. And the economics of deploying 5g, when you’re at the back of the backup book, don’t work either. So I can see this. And it is part of a broader plan. tilshead is doing some other satellite partnerships with business and other areas like this is definitely the way that it’s kind of going. But there’s a little bit where it’s kind of going, Oh, this is us saying we’re not just dependent on the NBN, we’re not just going to rely on only selling NBN to everyone. And maybe I’m cynical, and maybe I’ve watched Telstra for too long. While they really emphasised the regional element in this now and they said hey, we’re going to sell this to regional customers, there’s nothing stopping them selling Starlink to anybody in any location. So I really wouldn’t be surprised to see them once they’ve got it going. And those areas may be thinking if they think they can make the economics work, they think people are willing to pay the premium, saying, Hey, you can have this in the outer areas of urban areas. And to actually this is something that Starlink on its own has been going for very aggressively. They have this deal. They’ve been running for a few months now where they’ve dropped their normal instal fee, which is some of them 900 bucks north of that down to $199 if you’re classified as rural, but their version of rural is 60 kilometres out of a major city. Put this in a context you understand that and that’s the suburbs I can do in Geelong. And I don’t think Geelong councils rural by anybody stretch of the imagination. I listed these out for all the places you can do it in Sydney, there’s a bunch of places that are within easy commuting distances, Sydney and you get this deal. So styling has been saying hey, let’s go for these people who maybe feel a bit disappointed with their options. I would think I’d be amazed if at some point Telstra didn’t try and exploit that partnership to say hey, are you feeling like you don’t love your NBN options? You don’t like the tech you’ve got installed there. Maybe mobile broadband, have you Hey, what about this Telstra plus Starlink option? I would be really surprised if we don’t end up at that place at some point.

Adam Turner 

So the obvious targets there would be the homes that ended up on fixed wireless when they’re not actually that far away from the city. Because when they changed the NBN rollout, they said, Screw it, we’re just gonna throw you on picks while so we don’t have to do anything with your suburb.

Angus Kidman 

Yes, they would be that they’d be the real low hanging fruit, along with those very weird, exceptional people who live on a cliff top and he gets Grindmaster interest in a CD, which very occasionally you can do. But the majority of them yeah, they ended up on fixed wireless insight. And that’s not great. And they’ve been trying to move people off Skymaster on the fixed wireless in rural areas, but that’s not going to work so well, on your Peri urban edge as your developers like to describe it. So I do. I think one of the things this signals beyond that specific rural play, which at the end of the day is only probably a couple of 100,000 sites, if we’re honest, it’s representing Telstra going, Hey, we’re not just going to Yeah, we’ve sold off the NBN have made a lot of money out of that, thanks very much for buying our slightly superior cable. But they’re really saying, Oh, no, we’re not just going to be dependent on that we expect to have some other options. And I think this is in really planting a stake in the ground on that territory, whether or not they can price it in the way that a lot of people want to do it. But yeah, the same people who are willing to pay two and a half 1000 bucks for the latest iPhone, are probably going to be willing to pay for a service version of Starlink if they don’t have to set it up. So I think some of those people are out there.

Adam Turner 

So as you say, they’ve done other satellite deals in the past. And recently, they’ve signed a deal with one web, which is a different low Earth orbit satellite service. And I think primarily, it’s about extending their mobile coverage, because they want to use one link satellites, as the backhaul for the mobile towers in the middle of nowhere. But they’ve also haven’t ruled out using that perhaps to offer broadband later.

Angus Kidman 

Exactly. Yeah, no, they that current one with deal is all about backhaul is really important to their business model, not something that most consumers will face. But I think it’s it’s kind of signalling a mentality at Telstra, which is we’re just as happy to buy it as build it with 5g hear all about? Yeah, we’re gonna build that. And they have done that. I mean, even then, they’ve you know, tried to do these partnerships with Vodafone Simon says we’re surprised that hasn’t, because the regulator’s gotten that you’re not we’re not having that. But yeah, I think it’s a tells us kind of going into a global view of the world saying, hey, if there’s a good satellite here, and we can cut a deal, we’re going to get in and do it. And I think maybe the most interesting thing would say, how will that affect its rivals? We know, Office has invested quite a lot in satellite in recent years. That’s an area that has been focused on but is it going to stay going? Hey, shall we find the other people there? At some point we have to panic about Okay. Additionally, satellites, like there’s definitely something working to think about as a community. But this is not something the telcos think about. They’re just about, okay, how can I offer the next service? How can I offer it cheaply, but I do think we’re kind of entering this era where, historically in Australia, everybody built all their own infrastructure. That was how it was done, all our top infrastructure was there. And this, Telstra is really signalling a willingness to say, Well, hey, it was not actually physically on the ground, we don’t have to own it, we just have to be able to get access to it on good terms, and sell it to people. And that is quite a big shift, although we might not really see what that looks like, for a few years.

Adam Turner 

So there’s also NBN, has said that it’s looking at low Earth orbit satellites, that would that be the first time it’s used someone else’s infrastructure and not their own? If they did,

Angus Kidman 

if they went that direction. I mean, this is the NBN. So I’m not anticipating they’re going to build that infrastructure at any great speed. Because as we know, the super short takes a long time to heat up. So yeah, they’ve Yeah, they need to be realistic now that they’re in this phase of, oh, we’re supposed to be something that at least nominally is turning a profit, even though under the current government, they’re not under the same pressure to say we have to listen and get sold off and tend to do business. But yeah, I think again, realistically, when they look at whatever Skymaster three looks like, maybe they don’t deploy that themselves. Maybe they do a partnership with somebody. Yeah. Would they want to do a partnership with someone like Starlink? You wouldn’t think so? Because their level of caution is a lot higher. There was Yeah, even even for Telstra, that’s obviously a question mark. And when Telstra had their press briefing, this was written up very nicely by just how at The Guardian has often been a guest on the pipe. So the same way, they said, Oh, yeah, we did have to think about the Elon Musk factor. Before we did this. They sort of acknowledged the elephant in the room and said, Hey, we love elephants. That was a bad response, though. But I think NBN Co, which has to be more risk averse, because of the nature of its investment stuff. I think they would struggle to partner with Starling in its current form, but it doesn’t mean that some of these other more reputable, less out there less cage fighty satellite operators aren’t going to be an option for them.

Adam Turner 

But that’s, well, Telstra and Starlink. I haven’t heard anyone use the word exclusive. But I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s part of the deal is Telstra doing deals with the one webs in your style links. So there’s no one left for me and to do a deal with.

Angus Kidman 

I don’t know that that will be their main reason for doing it, but it’s probably a nice outcome. Again, I haven’t seen that terminology used, but it’s fairly typical that at the very least you’d have a window on have exclusivity for the length of the contract. Maybe after that. I mean, we wouldn’t want to sit here and predict what this market look like in three years time, except to say that we’ll be paying more, less than anything I’ll confidently petite. But yeah, you would expect that they’re going to go, Hey, you can’t do this in this region. But it does also make you wonder, I mean, is this the way that you know, Estarland going to make itself work by partnering in a lot of other areas because there’s no doubt that self service customer base won’t get you everywhere. If there’s a terrible option, you’ll play with it. But there’s probably a lot of market to be had with someone else who’s going to take on the expense of doing the servicing but also the profit from charging more by doing that. Jesus that was a capitalist sentence I’ve said in a while.

Adam Turner 

Well, that about wraps it up for another episode of Vertical Hold. Thanks to Gus for joining us this week. A pleasure as always, now, because you’re lazy brothers jetsetting off to Japan falls upon me to hit you with the three questions of doom. Where can people find your work online? Where can they find you on social media? And what would you do if you were declared Twitter el presidente A for the day,

Angus Kidman 

okay, so people can find my day to day work at Find a.com That au You can find my more esoteric rants about which train stations you can actually get Starlink at at Angus Kidman dot show. And you can find me on Twitter until it finally implodes at gasweld Au. Now, if I was given the ability to be Twitter, el presidente, for the day, I would make the whole thing open source, I’d move it to Mastodon and on appeal to the community to try and find that and turn it into an open source project. I think it would fail but it would be a much more elegant failure than the current toilet that we’re diving into right now.

Adam Turner 

To argue with that, and you can find us online at Twitter Well, it’s still there vertical hold Are you were also at verticalhold.com.au you and you find us on Facebook and even on Instagram last time I looked in maybe a few other places if you look really closely. So thanks for dropping by and don’t forget to drop us a line tell us what you think about you know, Telstra and styling taken on the NBN tell us what you think about the the Elon Zuckerberg cage fight and just tell us what you think we could do better in 2023

Angus Kidman 

So Adam, are you hinting that there’s actually a vertical hold only fans?

I think people will pay money not to see that.

Angus Kidman 

Monetization doesn’t matter how it works as long as it works.

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