There is little doubt that the emergence of low-orbit satellite services has revolutionized rural broadband connectivity. SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, has launched over 5,000 satellites, providing low-latency, fast, and cost-effective broadband services to a wider range of remote communities and locations worldwide than has been possible with legacy geostationary satellites. SpaceX plans to launch even more satellites, with rival Jeff Bezos’s Amazon initiative Project Kuiper poised to deploy a network of more than 3,200.

Increasingly, satellite service is providing stiff competition to mobile broadband providers. In New Zealand, one of SpaceX’s original broadband test sites, it is estimated that over 14 percent of rural broadband connections are subscribers to the satellite service. Quite simply, low-orbit satellite connectivity can go where it is too costly and geographically infeasible for even mobile services to go, but it also encroaches on the margins of where it is feasible to deploy mobile in the first place. The satellites already are rivals for rural broadband deployment subsidies historically open only to mobile operators.

Therefore, it is interesting that mobile network operators are now collaborating with satellite providers to incorporate satellite texting facilities into mobile phone handsets to provide near-seamless everywhere, every place connectivity. That is, satellites are not just broadband providers—they are becoming “cell towers in the sky.” In New Zealand, the operator OneNZ has partnered with SpaceX for a service launched commercially in December last year, while rival 2degrees is collaborating with Lynk for a service with a launch date yet to be announced. Clearly, these collaborations operate worldwide, with SpaceX partnering with (among others) Telstra in Australia, Rogers in Canada, T-Mobile in the US, and KDDI in Japan. Handset manufacturers are also getting on board—Oppo is prominent in its collaboration with OneNZ for the New Zealand offering.

While the new service is promising, and there are aspirations that eventually the transfer between cell towers and satellites for handing voice and data transfers will be seamless, at present the service is quite modest. It is a texting service only, and users will have to be patient: It can take up to two minutes to transport the messages from origin to destination. However, it can be a game changer for those in remote locations where mobile coverage does not reach. For example, as shown in a OneNZ advertisement, a trout fisherman in a very remote location is able to text a request to his partner to bring ice to tend to a fishing injury. The service also provides additional communications network resilience when natural disasters—such as forest fires and flooding—destroy cell towers and fiber connections. In these circumstances, slow connection is better than no connection when it comes to locating people and saving lives and property. The satellite-to-mobile service offers this functionality at relatively low cost.

However, as with all new technological developments, there are inevitable trade-offs. Competition concerns about network operators’ vertical integration will inevitably concern antitrust authorities, if they have not already responded. Ironically, the New Zealand Commerce Commission is currently investigating OneNZ—not for anticompetitive practices but for misleading advertising under the Fair Trading Act for implying instantaneous response in the fisherman advertisement, among others.

The increasing congestion in space as more satellites are launched and, not trivially, the consequences of space debris when accidents occur and end-of-life components fall from the sky are further concerns. The question of who owns and who is liable for damage caused by space debris that fell on a rural Saskatchewan farm last year caused conflict between the Canadian Space Agency and SpaceX, which was likely responsible for the junk. More satellites will mean more of these cases, accidental and planned.

During each satellite launch, parts of the launch equipment are jettisoned and fall to Earth. Likewise, planned discarding can occur as satellites age. For the most part, the satellite operators try to ensure these events occur so that the junk falls in places where little harm will occur. New Zealand has been favored as a launch site as the launch junk can be jettisoned into the largely unoccupied Southern Ocean, where it is very unlikely to cause harm to human activity when it falls. Discarding old parts when the satellites pass these locations is also preferred. However, the increasing amount of falling debris is starting to interfere with airline schedules when flights, notably between Australia and South Africa, traverse the Southern Ocean. Qantas, which flies these routes, notes it gets little time to react when notified of an expected event, with the increased number now causing a significant number of erratic delays in flights, as airlines are obliged to exercise extreme caution to avoid a catastrophic in-air collision.

Satellites may improve data transport, but at what cost? And to which humans?