just to do some napkin maths, the entire constellation is supposed to be 12k satellites. Some googling gives 20Gbps throughput per satellite, so that'd be about 240k Gbps per second.
Now of course the satellites keep exchanging information themselves and not all satellites are everywhere all the time but ignoring that, and let's say you can assume ten times as much bandwidth because not everyone is online at the same time, that still doesn't serve a lot of people right?
If you go with their eventual Gigabit speed claims that'd work out to about 2 million customers if I didn't make an error. That's only a single digit percentage of the American rural population let alone anywhere else in the world.
Gigabit speeds are great, but 80% of the value of Starlink is just getting the 11 Mbps to the people who can't get even that speed in any better way. There are many (millions?) of Americans who don't have that. So let's calculate from that number (or 10 Mbps, to make it easy).
I've heard that in most residential cases, people on average use about a tenth of their bandwidth. That gets us up to 240M customers. That's only about a tenth of the world's rural populations [1], but that is still pretty great.
Also, rural endpoints can be shared among multiple households, AFAIK small African villages often share one WiFi hotspot, and sometimes one phone/tablet/computer.
No, there are not millions of Americans who don't have that. Both viasat and Hughes provide 25Mbps everywhere in the USA, and up to 100Mbps in some cases. Your math is completely ignoring the fact that 80% of the satellites are over NOBODY at any given time.
I don’t think that would still apply. I’m in a rural area and our local ISP speeds go down to 1mbps in the evening, from a supposed 15. Streaming services are used by a lot of people at the same time.
If that’s the case, assuming 50mbs at 50x overprovisioning and $50/mo average, the 12k satellite system could provide service for 240m people and generate $144B/yr in revenue.
This will not be competitive with existing broadband offerings. Especially in competitive markets. Some people pay 70/month or less for 1GB currently in good markets. This will be competitive where the cost is currently 100/month for much slower connections.
Now of course the satellites keep exchanging information themselves and not all satellites are everywhere all the time but ignoring that, and let's say you can assume ten times as much bandwidth because not everyone is online at the same time, that still doesn't serve a lot of people right?
If you go with their eventual Gigabit speed claims that'd work out to about 2 million customers if I didn't make an error. That's only a single digit percentage of the American rural population let alone anywhere else in the world.