starlink cannot compete in densely populated area because the sats have comparatively (to dsl, fiber, etc.) limited total bandwidth to spare, just like any other shared medium. musk himself was very open about this. starlink is a game changer where the last mile is prohibitively expensive i.e. sparse/rural areas a few dozen miles away from population centers.
Building in dense urban areas carries its own set of problems akin to how pushing changes to a live product can be more difficult than hacking one together from scratch.
It requires aligning many stakeholders who often have conflicting interests e.g. all the building owners on the same block.
Any idea how suburbs fit into that? The last mile isn't prohibitively expensive, but enough that you don't get any kind of competition, either, and the space isn't extremely crowded.
By the time Starlink goes wide it probably won't be any cheaper than I'm currently paying, but what I am paying is quite absurd given that it's not a network of satellites. It's just a fiber optic cable that was long since amortized to zero.
It depends completely on how many of your neighbors have the same idea in a few dozen mile radius, and perhaps if you have a tree blocking a large part of the sky nearby.
Starlink can, indeed, compete to a degree in more densely populated areas, as I said. (Especially DSL.)
> SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has touted Starlink’s reach, saying it could bring 5G-like service to billions around the world while also handling up to 10 percent of the internet traffic in more congested regions “where people are stuck with Time Warner or Comcast.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/17/spacex-testing-its-own-satel...
