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I'm not so sure. One of the reasons cell phones work at all is that they are relatively close to the antenna. This service requires to antennas to be at least 100 miles away and doesn't have any provision to improve the gain on the client side. SMS may be roughly the limit of what they can provide in the available bandwidth. The inverse square law is a harsh mistress.

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There's always the option of increased gain on the serving side as well (both transmitting and receiving). 5G and related technologies allow beam steering which may improve gain (and selectivity) on the client side, and it's possible Apple may be working this angle on their side for whatever they're working on.

In sparsely populated areas where the service could be valuable, I think they can get away with a lot more (as far as frequency usage) than they could for mobile in dense areas. So I think it could indeed be useful.

It will not work. Their use case is low data rate applications. It's one of those case where you pick 2 among high number of users, high bandwidth, and low gain user terminals.

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