Yep. This is the kind of "create new markets" move that seems to not make sense, but will be a spectacular success if it pans out. And no one else will be able to compete. There is only one company in the world that will be capable to economically launch 30,000 satellites in a single-digit number of years.

Good luck making a business case with ARPUs of 3-4 USD / month from those people.

They have nothing to do in big cities, they cannot deliver the required data-rate density (bps/km2).

The higher altitude satellites are better for serving cities because the total bitrate gets averaged over more area - so you can have a hotspot of users in the city as long as there aren't many users in the surrounding ~600km circle.

Cities are spaced ~1200km apart in much of the world.

Well, you are saying that you have a fixed bitrate per beam to divide among all the users in the area. The bigger the area the more users. And once you reach saturation, that's it. Also, if there is a very populate city inside the beam footprint, you are only going to be able to serve to a very limited amount of people in there.

Not to mention, that cell towers may be a lot cheaper to operate over Starlink.

Are you sure?

Keep in mind current cell phone coverage is spotty, with many unserved or underserved areas, and towns where Verizon is clearly better than AT&T, or vice versa.

Running that kind of cell tower network might be cheaper, but running a cell phone network that spans every inch of the globe would be an engineering and logistics feat that would almost be impossible to profit off of.

Even maintenance-wise, servicing a cell tower requires keeping a bunch of contractors around to drive to drive, fly, or even boat to remote areas, and climb a hundred feet once they get there. With starlink, they can just piggyback replacement satellites on customer payloads.

Also, there are around 4 million cell towers in the world to achieve spotty coverage, whereas starlink is targeting 40k satellites for global coverage. I'd have to believe that launching 40,000 similar payloads via similar methods has huge vertical integration advantages over the extremely heterogeneous approaches we use to put up those millions of towers.

Sorry, I think I was misunderstood. Cell towers that work over starlink (i.e., use starlink as an uplink method) may be cheaper than cell towers that use a landline for an uplink.

So the ideal situation would be Starlink for remote areas, and in medium to higher density areas put up towers that talk to Starlink, then can speak to local receivers using terrestrial radio technologies.

Their cost though is limited range/coverage and very limited non-mobile data plans.

I want 100Mbps 1TB/mo anywhere.