Not valuable? Ships, oil rigs, airplanes, remote vacation destinations (e.g. ski lodges), etc have lots of money and a good concentration of rich people with lots of money.
This should enable cell phone companies to place a tower as long as they can run power to it (and solar panels might be an option for really remote towers).
So in effect all those towers share their Internet bandwidth.
850 has better propagation, hence its usage in rural.
The other factor is antenna patterns and site sectors. Many rural sites have an omni antenna, and with no tilt.
In cities you may see 6+ sectors on a site with 12 degree tilts. So your site has more bandwidth(20+ mhz), and way more capacity.
Long story short.. They give you less of the interwebs in rural because it's cheaper
I don't see the existing constellations remaining competitive for long.
Interesting, how do you know that?
That said, I know almost nothing about phased arrays, so I don't know if it's expensive due to some fundamental reason, or if it's partly because it's been a niche/low volume device before now.
- Number of satellites launched at once
- Stated bandwidth numbers of satellites
- Lack of concern over intentionally deorbitting satellites for testing and sending experimental prototypes to space with an apparently expected not negligible failure rate.
- Stated cost of the phased array groundstations (in the hundreds)