The Board is unlikely to be fussed as in relative terms the...

The Board is unlikely to be fussed as in relative terms the un-serviced mobile segment in Australia is quite small.
.Australia already has 87% mobile penetration with one in three children under 12 having mobile phones.

This is not to down-play the activity occurring across remote and rural Australia and particularly WA, but in terms of mobiles and the sat-phones of the service companies and FIFO workers, it all adds up to fairly small numbers and is certainly not unique.

Take the globally shipping industry: it is a relatively large segment not well serviced by the shipping lines and available with no restriction to Starlink beaming. If you own a container ship, fishing vessel, oil-rig support craft you can install a marine Starlink terrminal at a port with beaming approval and give your crew access to IP telephony wherever you go in international waters.

Shipping companies say they have trouble finding crews and training them on board( lot of safety and other compliance required) so one way they can keep them in touch with their families, able to see a football and finish their courses is to install a Starlink terminal.

Unlike Telstra Netlinkz is a global reseller of Starlink which gives it a large potential market in countries which have granted Starlink access. The number is growing monthly. In March most of South America was opened, but not Argentina. Chile is open where there are dozens of copper-gold miners and explorers operating in remote locations. Mozambique has opened in Africa, but not South Africa or Tanzania. There are 6-7 Australian graphite developers in Tanzania and Mozambique. Syrah's Belama mine, the largest in the world, is in Mozambique, Often these processing operations will employ 200 or more staff

For Netlinkz distribution is either direct or through telco partners or comms service companies. Currently there are four telco partners: ALT Telecommunications, HGC Global, Spark NZ and more recently PT&T of the Philippines.

The arrangement with ALT in Thailand has been outlined in general terms, but some basic research soon reveals the situation. The Nation, (March 14) says Thailand is the most popular destination for Japanese companies moving their plants from China to SE Asia. It says there are 6000 Japanese companies operating in Thailand. An earlier report says there are already 594 Japanese industrial facilities, typically related to the auto or med-tech industries but also major consumer goods companies like Daikin. In the last 4-5 years as the political climate changed in China this process has accelerated. Foxconn is partly locked into Apple product production in China, but it is moving the watch operations while the large contract manufacturers have long aware of geo-political risk. Jabil Circuit has multiple plants in Thailand for that reason. For others like the Swiss owned Bossard, a specialist in preparing prototypes. Companies like this need to be where products are made i.e. increasingly in South East Asia.

They IP of these companies also needs protecting from cyber theft and from malware black mail and denial of service attacks and Russian. Smaller suppliers can be an under-belly as in the case of the recent malware attack on Kinmax Technologies, a supplier to TSMC, the critically big Taiwan chip-maker. Russia's LockBit pirates demanded $70m. This is one of the largest ransoms so far demanded.

These firms are all possible customers for ALT or HGC Global. The VSN in network as a service form can be quickly run out to offer mobile, cloud and IOT connection and protection. As the software is agnostic about cloud services, the organization can pick and chose where data is stored and by almost service brand: AWS, Onedrive, iCloud, Ali Cloud etc

For HGC Global these elements can all be combined. It is a US owned business fanning out across the globe from its original Hong Kong base to landing points in SE Asia and a total of 25 points of presence. Where optic fibre makes little sense economically or where high security and is required it can extend its reach to companies like Foxconn in Thailand and follow them to Brazil, Singapore, Japan, Europe or the US as suits.

There's no detail yet from Spark, but the elements are much the same. There are relatively few large NZ companies like Foxconn (although Fonterra is huge) but a number of mid size suppliers who have outgrown the domestic market and who have special supply supply relationship China.

NZ is also the "shaky isles" where infrastructure is frequently disrupted. Power companies spend considerable sums repairing telephone posts and wires and would welcome the combination of solar+ batteries+ reliable comms in the more isolated farming regions.

PT&T in the Philippines seems to offer the most striking example of how this all fits together. It has fibre optic networks across the largest three islands, but does not service 51% of the population which live on either outer islands, or in the more remote parts of Luzon, Leyte, Negros, Panay and Mindanao.

PT& T competes with 4-5 newer carriers in the main population centres, but can use Starlink to leap-frog some of its competitors and avoid the cost of under sea cable to the 10 or so islands with populations of 500,000 plus. One likely application is to combine terminals with relays to connect mobiles and other devices across a village, hospital, fish farm, gold mine, etc, etc.

Being on edge of the same Pacific plate as New Zealand, the terminals are likely to be deployed not only to fill gaps , but for redundancy where cyclones, intense floods and earthquakes disrupt services. The increasing severity of cyclones is now knocking out entire towns and small cities. New Zealand's North island floods were Biblical in intensity. If a transponder is crushed by a falling building, another can be up and running in ten minutes as generators are fired up. Robust comms is becoming increasingly important as we move into the wild anthropocene.

Whether these elements can apply to nearby Indonesia with its 289 million will depend on when beaming rights are given, but, in principle, an Indonesian roll-out would be similar. As in the Philippines, the bulk of the population is in Java with its 117 million. Sumatra has 60 million, leaving 85 million, more than three times our population - across Kalimantan, Sulawesi, West Iran etc, This group, including many in Sumatra, are largely poor farmers and fishers, but still deserving some connection for medical services, education etc.

Obviously Netlinkz must wait on these companies to complete their planning before it can release revenue projections and and proposed operational detail, but there is still much on the public record for shareholders to chew on.

PT &T seems to be enthusiastic about the potential as seen in a recent interview with the COO but its website spells out what's ahead in general terms:

With its archipelagic nature, the Philippines poseschallenges when it comes to connectivity. However, satellite technology emergesas the ideal solution, allowing access to even the most remote and inaccessibleterrains such as towering mountains, isolated islands, and offshore locations.

The Netlinkz partnership brings:

▪ Secure Internet, with Netlinkz VSN transforming Starlinktechnology into a business grade service providing secure high-speed internetand an invisible cloud network

▪ Network Security, which future proofs clients’business with Netlinkz’s high-speed, secure cloud first private work solutions

▪ Secure CCTV and IoT, with Netlinkz VSNensuring that all clients’ video feeds and data from their CCTV and IoT systemsare securely transferred, integrity checked and securely stored.