That doesn't sound right. A satellite doesn't have to be directly overhead to be reachable. The coverage map below suggests that each satellite can cover a region 800-1000km in diameter, so with a fully deployed constellation of 12,000 to 42,000 satellites, there should easily be 50+ sats visible from any metro area. Perhaps even more than that.
This means satellites are going to cover a very large area. There might be 50 sats to cover the area from Boston down to Washington DC. That's 1tbit/sec of bandwidth to cover 100m potential customers.
Considering beta service afiak is using 600-1200 sats I imagine sat penetration will be significantly less. Considering cell towers between 4G and 5G can offer 20gbps _per tower_ these days I can't see 20gbps working across an entire state. Especially when it has been hyped as better than terrestrial internet. Even with a small number of users it will degrade rapidly at peak times when you get 1-3k users watching netflix.
The math just doesn't add up. It's a similar problem to why 4G/5G isn't a viable replacement for home internet service (yet) in many areas, apart from its much worse as it's easier to add new 5G base stations to densely cover cities than add new satellites.