With SVs separated by hundreds of km, the beam width would be absolutely tiny, and channel reuse would be effectively infinite.
Wonder why you'd rather fill LEO to the brim, emitting vast amounts of CO2 in the process and filling stratosphere with metal oxides, than figure out how to improve infrastructure in your neighborhood.
I do think this is a temporary issue; once the cable ISP monopolies are no longer valuable because anyone can just get Starlink, that competitive pressure will push down hard on those cable monopolies and infrastructure laws will have to return to sanity. Terrestrial ISPs with fiber-sharing requirements and appropriate infrastructure build-out could absolutely out-compete Starlink, but right now they can just collude together and lobby against changing the status quo.
I would much prefer to have a functional bureaucracy and intelligent, efficient infrastructure! But it's probably easier to fix that by launching the largest satellite constellation ever than by playing politics against some of the wealthiest media companies on the planet.
Example:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/space-jun...
Beware the murder hornets!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/02/us/asian-giant-hornet-was...
Just because the problem hasn't gotten too bad yet doesn't mean it isn't real (especially because the problem involves a positive-feedback "domino effect" and junk might be infeasible to clean up).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
With regard to Starlink: I was a little bit concerned because of the large number of satellites they're putting up, but as far as I understand, Starlink isn't actually a big risk right now as far as space junk goes because the satellites orbit at low altitudes (340 miles) and are expected to naturally de-orbit relatively quickly due to atmospheric drag. (The decision to put them at low altitudes had to do with network latency.) If Elon were to say tomorrow, "hey we're moving Starlink out to 500 miles" I would hope some kind of regulation would be able to prevent that.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/59559/how-long-can...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89909-7
That was always the thinking of all kinds of pollution that they are insignificant, till it "suddenly" became a problem and "everyone" was surprised.
Well, if you're convinced it's inevitable then it is.
The 'end goal' is to have it use the laser link to send the traffic across to a satellite close to the final destination, that should in theory help massively redistribute the ground station traffic.
It's obviously not foolproof, there's still bandwidth to be shared there but using a combination of some clever routing you could theoretically spread traffic across multiple satellites and groundstations with minimal latency impact.
Typical calculations (using only publicly available info as a caveat) generally point towards the current starlink constellation supporting a really low density of antennas.
If you want the details, the person who created starlink.sx has a great blog with some incredible calculations[0]. The section that is most relevant is under the heading "Simulation with TDM and beam spread combined".
Basically, the result is that starlink could support around 15 antennas/user terminals per "cell" at 75mbps, where a cell is about 252 square km. This is roughly 1 terminal per 17 square km.
If you allow for 10x oversubscription, fairly common for ISPs, that gets you to 1 terminal per 1.7 square km. Not really that impressive when you compare it to the density and services where 99.9% of people live, but it clearly helps out the small number of people way out there.
0: https://mikepuchol.com/modeling-starlink-capacity-843b2387f5...