At most, starlink can replace one tmobile.
amz seem to be buying into everything under the sun and trumpling usage agreements (i.e. "reselling" consumer broadband with people joining via dark-patterns despite it being against their ISP terms of service, via amz sidewalk product)... and that can scale up to O.G. Bell levels of monopoly.
Other than Kuiper, Amazon has shown no signs of becoming a serious player in the consumer ISP space. Sidewalk is not a consumer ISP service in its own right, it needs to piggyback on a third-party consumer ISP service. Amazon is nowhere near becoming anything resembling Bell.
Capacity would be aggregate bandwidth, which is determined by the satellite's communications technology (number of transponders, spectrum allocated, modulation used, etc) rather than directly by which orbit it is in.
Comparing constellation sizes does make sense in determining total capacity (aggregate bandwidth of the constellation) assuming that Starlink and Kuiper use similar capacity satellites. I think that is a reasonable assumption, but we have limited info on what Kuiper are planning. Current Starlink satellites have on average 20 GBps capacity each. I can't find any public info on the planned capacity of Kuiper's satellites. Even if Kuiper has higher bandwidth satellites, they'd need a fourfold advantage in bandwidth to overcome Starlink's fourfold advantage in satellite count. And SpaceX is likely to increase the capacity of Starlink in future iterations, so even if Kuiper did have such a bandwidth advantage, it might not last.
The satellite capability is one thing, but spectrum is another. SpaceX doesn't have priority on a lot of the spectrum they have, so it might be completely unusable by the time they go live.
I feel like we are arguing two different things. I was saying Kuiper can't beat Starlink. You are arguing Starlink is not going to succeed. I'm more optimistic about its prospects than you are, but even if you are right, it wouldn't change my original point – if both fail, then Kuiper still doesn't beat Starlink.
Blue Origin is two years older than SpaceX, and yet has achieved far less than SpaceX has in the same timeframe despite a two year head start. Over that timeframe, SpaceX has successfully delivered 124 Falcon 9 payloads to orbit. Blue Origin hasn't sent anything to orbit yet, New Glenn is targeted to "late 2022" but most observers think it won't launch until 2023 (or even later).
Blue Origin is the one that needs to prove itself here. SpaceX has a proven capacity to deliver payload to orbit. With Starship, that capacity is going to greatly increase. But even if Starship runs into trouble and gets delayed, they still have a proven capacity with Falcon 9 to rely on while any issues with Starship gets delayed. Blue Origin is working through the issues on New Glenn without any fallback.
But to be clear, none of this matters. The business case to sell a $1000 terminal for under $300 isn't closing. They're subsidized right now, and public perception will be very different once the real sticker shock comes in.
Is Blue Origin good at its goals? On New Glenn, which is what matters here (not New Shepard), the jury is still out. By contrast, for Falcon 9, the jury returned a verdict long ago.
> The business case to sell a $1000 terminal for under $300 isn't closing. They're subsidized right now, and public perception will be very different once the real sticker shock comes in.
They say they've been cutting the manufacturing cost from $3000 to $1500 to $1000; you are assuming they aren't going to succeed in cutting it further. Even if they can't get it all the way down to $500 (the current sticker price), if they can get it down to $600 or $700, a $100-$200 price rise for new customers caused by withdrawing the subsidy is unlikely to be a huge issue. (The $300 figure was just an aspirational goal Musk set, nobody is paying that little right now, who knows if anyone ever will.)