At the same time: coverage comes cheap to Starlink. Which makes it perfect for serving areas no one wants to serve. Such as rural areas, anything outside the largest cities in underdeveloped countries, the open ocean, and so it goes.
Insufficient for what?
> and shrinking TAM.
Starlink has made quite an impact on planning around servicing commercially non-viable or marginal customers in government and telcos where I am from. It is IMO quite likely that some existing cell towers in remote areas that are very expensive to operate and maintain will eventually be shut down. So that could actually expand the "TAM".
> The only places a terrestrial wireless provider doesn't want to serve are places that can't afford FWA even though it costs less.
No, they also don't want to serve places where it costs more.
Starlink needs tens of millions of subscribers to be valued like a telco.
The starlink network surely has special features to support US military needs (resiliance, encryption, blocking enemy countries from access, robustness against countermeasures, yaddayadda).
In comparison, each Starlink satellite costs around $1 million to manufacture and launch, and each satellite lasts at least 5 years. So cost per satellite per year is $200k. They currently have 7,600 satellites serving 7 million customers, meaning on average, each satellite serves almost 1,000 customers. At $200k per satellite per year, each customer needs to pay $200 per year for them to break even. It seems likely that launch costs will go down in the future, meaning this number will decrease.
There's also the complication that each new Starlink satellite improves coverage & bandwidth for the entire globe, while each new 5G tower improves coverage & bandwidth in a specific area. A county may have a population density of 2-4 households per square mile, but many of those households are clustered together. The less dense areas are not likely to be covered by cell towers any time soon, as it's less economically viable. Another disadvantage of cell towers is service failures. A single Starlink satellite failure means a slight degradation of service, while a single cell tower failure means everyone in the region is taken offline. In areas where both services are available, people would be likely to prefer the more reliable option.
I hope Starlink can maintain enough regular non-crisis subscribers to subsidize this incredibly helpful use case.
Perhaps governments could/do pay a retainer to keep this option alive.
At a certain scale you're going to have to make the argument that laying a 10,000KM glass fiber across the ocean for 10-20% more latency is a better value than beaming it around in LEO.
Planes; yachts; cruise ships; naval vessels; sea-based drilling, mining and research platforms; mines in the middle of nowhere are a shrinking TAM?
You may also be underestimating how many large rural landowners don't want to give telcos (and the relevant authorities) access to any of their land.
And yet, people live in those places, and you telling them that they're not economically worth serving isn't really solving their problem.
...just depends if it's economically viable
