Seen talk of gig speeds next year.

It's not a question of ability, but desire. Tons of people are still married to traditional tv channels, my parents included. They have fiber in a relatively rural setting but still have Dish for tv. They're far from alone in that.

No cable here, I’ll be streaming all of my viewing content. It’s 2021, Elon is probably aware of the use-case.

Seems like his entire goal is to bypass terrestrial connectivity provided by the legacy services. Eliminate dependency on the power grid and the data grid... Imagine if the local tyrant couldn’t shut your power and internet off at will!

They have already tested the lasers last year, and this year started launching laser equipped satellites. It's why there are fewer ground stations the farther south they are sending the satellites. I have heard absolutely nothing about them having problems with them.

It works out to about 1.7mm users at that cost, and SpaceX has requested from the fcc to support up to 5mm users in just the US. Requesting 10x the users than what they originally planned is telling how much demand there has been in just the US alone. That's not to mention they are already taking deposits from people in Canada, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand currently. And, have set up base stations in Europe already. Hughesnet alone has over a million customers, for capped service at the same price or more as starlink, that is 6 to more times slower. ViaSat in just the US has 700k customers for datacapped services at starlinks price that is 6 times slower.

There are already companies out there that are charging more, for shittier service, that are somehow doing what you claim starlink can't do. And, they don't even have their own launch capabilities, and are paying way more just in logistic costs.

In the US Millions.  the US alone will more than recoup the cost.  Any additional money paid by the rest of the world is pure profit.  He could charge $10 a month in Africa and be making large profits.

Millions in urban areas have cut the cord... Myself included.  People in rural areas will gladly do it too.  They will simply cut the cord the instant high speed internet becomes available to them.

You can run a hand held device off wifi... for inside your house or RV or Boat service.  At some point an add on device may be available to give yourself your own "cell tower" to give you longer range from where your dish is.  If SpaceX Starlink doesn't offer such a device then a 3rd party will... just like a router you plug in currently.

You could get several million customers in North America alone just from Boats and RVs.

Rural areas is a very broad term and you may be confusing extreme rural.  Extreme rural is like Montana, Wyoming,etc. You would be surprised how many people who live in outer suburban areas of smaller cities who do not have high speed internet.
I have a friend who I consider suburban.  Doesn’t live that far from the city. Lives on a private drive with 9 other houses. The Main Street the private drive runs off of has high speed. The telecommunications company refused to run high speed internet to those 9 houses down that private drive as it would cost them to much to install the cable.
This is the same as 100s of thousands of millions of other sub-suburban people.
People who live in the cities and suburbs take high speed internet and great cellphone service for granted. You don’t have to drive far out of the cities to find places that are way behind in technology. It’s just too damn costly to run all that cable for miles for just a few customers.
Hell, my son who lives in Georgia has crappy /intermittent internal service. He isn’t that far from a city.

Edit - explained extreme rural

Good choice Waldo.
Been at the cabin lately?
The Trout fishing will be good pretty soon!
'All The Best'.

Thanks @Micke !

YW, mnew.

Starlink will be the new monopoly.

I pay $110 a month for 20mb service from my electric coop WISP currently because it’s my only option.

I work remote and need reliability....as soon as Starlink can provide that I’ll pull the trigger.

We are still building our WISP in lieu of Sarlink.  I'm still skeptical of its performance once there are a shitload of customers.  I'm probably wrong about that but dont care.  Our community will buy local and if they're getting good service they won't switch.  

We're on 2 towers and signing customers every day.  Looking at rural broadband grants for some pretty sizable builds in the area.

Starlink can’t come soon enough to rural Arizona. They will NEVER put fiber up where I live. They’re never going to spend millions of dollars to service 40 homes. No matter how many times you hear promises from your electric company to start stringing service. They’ll hit the downtown area of city that already had options and never go anywhere that need it. I put my 100 bucks down within minutes of getting the email from Starlink.

My options currently;
1. Frontier DSL. Maybe .6mbps and literally doesn’t work half the day. 65 bucks.
2. Verizon Jetpack on a 4g lte plan. Data caps and throttle city. Network won’t connect to a router so all your devices that need internet that aren’t wireless are fucked. Speeds of maybe 1.5mbps in the middle of the night. Under 40 bucks.
3. OTR Mobile plan. Repackaged AT&T unlimited service. Breakneck speed of 9mbps when run thru a directional WeBoost antenna that cost about 750 dollars. Randomly the SIM cards shit the bed and you have to wait for a new one to be mailed to you and play fuck-fuck games. Their Netgear MR1100 modem at least interfaces with a router to share your data. 100+ bucks a month. Pricing always goes up. Service gets shittier and shittier.

any concerns about the uplink signal being prohibited as well?

For those who've never heard of the NRQZ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone