The problem is that rich people live in areas that have good mobile coverage, and Starlink won't be very attractive to them. LTE can offer transfers better than 600 Mbps with lower latency today, and covers 99% of population (in the developed countries). 5G will get over 1 Gbps per sector and it's coming soon.
Rich people have boats, by definition these are people with too much money to spend and is a huge market. Airplanes? This will revolutionize coverage on long haul non-polar flights.
Trains? Buses? These both have density issues with the existing cellular network. How many times have you come to a halt in a traffic jam only to have horrible cellular coverage due to the local cell site being overwhelmed?
5G doesn't solve any of these use-cases. There is plenty of room for adoption of starlink at premium prices.
With enough people in once place, Starlink will suffer from congestion just like a cellular network. I don't think it's fundamentally different in that regard. But great for boats indeed!
> Maybe you could roam on another LEO provider. There are over a dozen companies from a number of countries planning their own Starlinks.
I mean, they're planning their own internet satellite constellations. None of them are anywhere close to the 12k satellites in the original Starlink proposal. If you added everyone else's proposals together, you might make 1 more Starlink, but probably not.
5G may hit 1 Gb/s peak, but I'm 100% sure that the major US carriers will throttle the crap out of it so that you don't get anywhere near that. I'm on Verizon in a decent sized city, and any streaming is throttled heavily. Speedtests work fine because the carriers know how to game them. But actual throughput on cellular sucks.
They throttle, because there is much more demand than available bandwidth. However in cellular networks, you can add more bandwidth relatively cheaply by adding more nodes in high demand areas, and the total bandwidth of a single node is already higher than the promised 600 Mbps of Starlink. Therefore Starlink is not a competitor to cellular networks, because it can't compete by throughout nor latency. It competes with coverage though, but I'm not sure of there are enough rich people in boats to cover the investment.
Industrial sensing equipment, airliners, high-frequency traders could all be some of the 'rich' first customers. They are all underserved by the LTE networks and have the money to pay for a reliable, low-latency connection.
Latency will be higher than LTE just because of the distance.
And I'm not sure if a long distance satellite link would be more reliable than a local LTE link with a dedicated antenna.
