Yeah, as an RVer, I can tell you that you would probably be surprised by how much of the country does not have readily available cell service. And even if it does, they might not have it on your network.

I was paying more to have SIM cards for all of the big three, and getting much less out of it

RV is a great use case but a tiny market. For fixed broadband the others are cheaper most everywhere in the U.S. that people actually live.

The markets are additive. The great thing about Starlink is that it is GLOBAL. Meaning if you want to offer it for ships and planes (where there are no alternatives) you might as well also offer it to RV. And to rural people. And to the military. And you can do so in every country on the whole planet at the same time.

Having a few 1000s of sats to cover the whole planet is crazy efficient.

If you look at just the satellites, the build + launch costs are about $2.5M ea, which is impressive to be sure. But they only last 5 years, so that's $500k per year replacement costs. Then if you look at their capacity, they still can't meet their FCC / RDOF broadband designation speeds, but let's be generous and say they can serve 1000 simultaneous users per satellite (their current ratio, let's say it's good enough, incl. oversubscription ratio). So that already means 50%-100% of the entire monthly Internet bill from a consumer is going to just be replacing satellites. Let alone everything else to be an ISP.

This is very basic math. They need to launch more satellites if they want to hit their RDOF throughput goals and serve customers in the remaining areas. The most valuable extra-rural areas were low hanging fruit and already drying up.. the future addressable market is more dense and competitive suburban areas, which further limits the number of users per satellite from intracell interference. (Ships, planes, RV, while nice are tiny markets by comparison.)

But as you know well--having your personal connections to SpaceX it seems as you always defend them on HN--Starlink is about Golden Dome not consumer internet, so the private markets will fund it.

I live in a city. Like a large number of Americans, I had one broadband provider available for 20 years. (Something like 75% of us have 1 or 2).

The price was high and the service was bad. I struggled to reliably achieve 20mbs at $80/mo.

Starlink is better than that, and it’s millions of people. 5g home internet is slow to spread here too.

Their market is large.

Yes and unless you're paying Starlink say $300/mo, they are taking a loss to serve you internet. Cities are especially difficult for them because more users are in the same spot beam so everyone shares the spectrum and they need even lower oversubscription ratios.

Yeah I don't know about the math. I've seen numbers that differ significantly from yours, but none which make it profitable at a reasonable price. I am sure he will continue to drop launch costs and I assume satellite improvements will make them able to serve more people, maybe orbit longer as they get smaller.

Or maybe it'll just implode. I hope not.

That math doesn't need to mask sense, it's always been about Golden Dome.

Complete nonsense. They didn't start in 2015 and didn't get investment into Starlink from Google because hopefully some presidnet would want Goldon Dome in the future. Starlink is a good business and has plenty of military value without Goldon Dome.

Australia we just turned 3G off now there are large black spots everywhere for hours.

Some trades now use them in there cars, they can use it for mobile service/internet nearly anywhere

Residential prices:

100 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €29/month in Europe, $39/month in the US.

200 Mbps down / 15-35 Mbps up, unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €49/month in Europe, $69/month in the US.

400+ Mbps down / 20-40 Mbps up (QoS higher priority), unlimited data, includes hardware rental: €69/month in Europe, $109/month in the US.

A good high-speed fiber connection is obviously better quality and value; but if you don't have one, then Starlink is absolutely the most competitive option you're going to get.

I don't have a lot of data points, but in metropolitan France at least I think you would always be better off with either a fiber or a 5G subscription, because it will be cheaper for more throughput, and because fiber is very widespread.

In Germany I think you are still better off with a cable subscription which also seems to be widespread in my experience and is cheaper than Starlink even if it's not as good as French deals (I only take in account offers without a contract for fairness, but if you don't mind you may be able to get even cheaper offers).