In a world where people are increasingly living in urban areas, fiber will annihilate satellite internet.
Starlink is yet another niche thing which Musk is specialized in pursuing.
In fact all of Musck companies can be summarized with "everybody has heard of them in the financial and technology press, but not many people use them"
I would not have guessed that the satellite tv market would have gone on as long as it has, considering how many satellite customers also have access to cable. And yet, you can drive through any suburb and find plenty of dishes.
Not that many people need internet access in the middle of the ocean.
Fiber may be way better, but putting a glorified wifi router on top of a million dollars worth of kerosene and stainless steel is a great deal cheaper than digging a 1000km long trench.
There aren't many of them compared to the people in cities, but being able to serve the billion or so people that would have to pay hundreds a month for crappy microwave internet with somewhat less crappy space microwave internet sounds like a the one company he's running that isn't fleecing the taxpayers or investors.
Those hundred people can't dig a particularly long trench or put in more than a few thousand poles for $600,000.
Seems to work out unless I'm vastly over estimating the bandwidth of whatever the bottleneck in the constellation is.
Plus there's all the people in cities willing to pay extra for low latency.
The relative ease of throwing up a few satellites and selling internet across the globe vs digging trenches to each and every residence make me think it's going to be a very popular internet option very soon.
So I never really got how any other place has any excuses.