The broadband itself might be nice or it might be awful. It doesn’t actually matter because that was never the point.
If it does use up most of the low orbit space it is because SpaceX is the only company that is even capable of launching that many satellites and making money on it. Until there is another challenger there is zero point in complaining, because competition is not even an option.
Since it is low orbit it is self limiting problem. Any low orbit satellite has a limited lifetime of a few years without power.
This reply brought to you over a robust, fast, low latency and reliable Starlink connection.
Only if each subscriber is using an average of 15-20 Mbps during peak times will about 50% of subscribers see some throttling.
Interestingly they only showed a single graph of average bandwidth over time from a cable company to estimate needs for SpaceX. No clue if they actually separated it out by time zone for each coverage area in their actual analysis.
Because $99/month * 12 months * 10 years * 1,000,000,000 customers = $11.88T isn't the point to a man who literally needs a trillion dollars to pull off the grandest mega-project ever.
Anyways, I don't buy that SpaceX will end up consuming too much of a precious resource. Even if it were so, what would be a fair way to share that resource, and who even with?! There's only one announced competitor to Starlink at this time, and they're not even remotely close to being operational. What makes SpaceX able to put up Starlink at such low cost (compared to its earning potential) is that SpaceX has lowered launch costs for itself (and others) by a lot, and they're working to lower those costs even more. What is "fair" when a company works so hard to lower costs and increase availability? Is it to punish them so others get a chance to compete at higher costs??
1. There's a lot of room up there, and actually claiming & using it is a normal process for civilizing frontiers.
1b. Handwaving about "underappreciated precious resources" is a waste of opportunity. I get the sentiment, but belongs in the 3rd part of the aphorism "lead, follow, or get out of the way."
2. Saying "SpaceX isn't in it for the money" is ridiculous, considering they could gross >$10T in the next decade with it, at ridiculously low expenditure.
2b. In that timeframe, other businesses would be just barely starting to seek out a small fraction of that "precious resource".
If we’re going to take the “precious resource” argument seriously, let’s. One Starlink satellite can earn ~$25M/year, setting the value of that slot. This seems a reasonable value for LEO “homesteading”; if someone wants it, that’s a fair price to pay. And I do mean fair, seeing as it’s SpaceX inventing the technology, building the satellites, staking claims, and otherwise being first-mover and pioneer of LEO on a colonizing scale (so to speak). That includes the value of serving 25,000 people per satellite at $100/month. Want that orbital property? pay the trailblazer that made that parcel valuable. (As for “Earth’s population has a fair share” - no, they didn’t do squat for it beyond what one was already paid for to get SX there. Anyone is free to go there now and lay claim. Government involvement should be nothing more than collecting cost of tracking claims and resolving disputes.)
That being said, your napkin math is a bit off. A single Starlink satellite isn't all that valuable. It can only talk to ground stations in some region on Earth for a short period of time. It's the dozens of satellites per plane that make the service useful (24/7 coverage). While you can divide total revenue by the number of satellites, the service only works with a complete orbital plane.
The planes that cover mostly empty ocean would be far less valuable than ones that covered subscriber-dense populations. But of course that's in a world where somehow a competitor needs to buy a "slot" from Starlink and not just orbit a few miles higher in the same plane.
No, sorry, I think as long as SpaceX continues to work to lower costs and increase access then to get in their way would be a terrible mistake.
"This is the world SpaceX’s Starlink program, which has set a goal to provide high-speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable."
Can we be honest for once and be up-front about a corporation's real goals? As if <insert technology here> was going to do anything about the gaping inequality and other social problems that actually matter to people. That your comment gets down-voted is certainly telling about the audience here.