I remember when they announced Starlink (and 3 or 4 competitors started angling at the space too) that I made a rough prediction that its never going to become a global internet, its a niche product for rural users that will immediately hit a ground station in the same country.

Despite consistent, vocal, misunderstanding from rusted on musk stans, this continues to be the truth.

In fact Starlink continues to obey every Carrier and Satellite related law in every country that it does business. Musk spends significant time shitting on the australian government, but he absolutely pays for his spectrum and he absolutely submits all requested information to the australian government.

Starlink's ground stations basically operate like a traditional ISP, just worse. To the point where to really get any traction its more or less a Vocus operation in Australia these days.

>Yes, Biden and the FCC successfully fought Starlink, they got the awards for rural connectivity revoked, and the appeal of the revocation also kept the award revoked because starlink supposedly couldn't provide rural connectivity. So at least on paper starlink has "failed" to meet the needs of rural folks.

This doesnt surprise me in the least. Where my customers use starlink in an area with any kind of population its a race to the exit. Where it is doing amazing is on remote cattle stations with near to no density. I have seen what passes for Rural in the USA and its positively urban by Australian standards. Where WISPs are professionalising they arent really becoming threatened by Starlink (where they suck they are getting creamed by them however)

>T-Mobile is betting pretty clearly that starlink WILL be able to deliver messaging via a space based backhaul.

T-Mobile probably has to meet Starlink at every base station in the country they are working on.

>And rumor has it that starlink is bringing in some real money even if the govt has determined its not technically feasible so there is some market validation of their ideas.

This doesnt surprise me. I have evaluated several alternative satellite internet providers, and starlink is extremely cheap in comparison. Lack of layer 2 services is a dealbreaker for some companies however, which is why I was still seeing 15k pa 20M sat services as of 2024. Theres some interesting things happening in MEO. Ironically, if Starlink ever hits multigig, we will probably see MEO services hit widespread availability of roughly 200M and the corresponding cost saving might throw starlink under the bus.

>space based backhaul.

This remains the untested claim. Much like Tesla cars becoming commonplace, Spaceship going to Mars, hyperloops etc, the actual stated goal of the company is what lies unachieved.

My rough calculations were that space based backhaul is prohibitively expensive, and doesnt benefit well from scale out of small satellites. Its all about routing density. He has a line of larger sats going up, but even then I just dont see it. Every increase in routing capacity is going to come with increases in heat and failure. The starlink constellation is good at dropping the link at the nearest ground station, its very unlikely to ever become good at sending your data to a ground station on another continent.