Starlink, specifically.

I've spent the last while driving through a lot of very-rural areas.  These are places where the average home is a trailer or a rather-poor condition and older home; the people there do not have much money.

$120/mo is too much.  And on the poles out there I am seeing fiber being pulled but not yet terminated, so this opportunity will wind up being filled that way and thus to compete with it you have to be cheaper on a long-term basis.

Starlink might be able to do that if it pencils; I do not know if it does.

Consider the current $50 "roam" 50GB package.  Too expensive.  But a $30/mo offering limited to 50Mbps, with a $5/mo permitting not-while-moving roaming add-on that can be added and dropped as desired (e.g. "take it with you to the next apartment, rental or on the road in your cheap RV or even car if you get evicted, but you can't use it while moving) would sell and it would remain viable once the glass shows up.

It will never beat the glass but a lot of people in that situation find the difference between $350/year and $600/yr to be enough to make the difference between "I can afford it" and "I can't."

People in the middle class and above don't think this way but the person living off Dollar General and EBT do.  $20-30/mo is a couple of cheap 12-packs of beer, some smokes or a couple of packs of gummies or pre-rolls full of THC and yeah, at that margin it matters.

The question is whether it pencils.  You have to keep it from being attractive to the guy who has the money to pay the $120, and limiting throughput to 50mbps does that.  But -- its enough for an SD stream or two, all the web browsing and Youtube or similar on an inexpensive computer.  It will definitely not do the job for content download, gaming and similar things but those people aren't in that market and restricting it so it can't be used that way means those who can afford the better service will buy it and you won't cannibalize the higher end of the market.

This is one of the puzzlers that I have with Elon and many of his offerings.  He walks right past market opportunities like this which makes no sense unless his goods and services simply can't be sold at an operating margin that works within those price points.

If it can't then Starlink is a niche product that increasingly gets crowded out as fiber deployment expands and all the electric utilities are pulling glass along with their wires for their own telemetry.  It is faster and impervious to most damage other than physical destruction including by lightning where CATV is not, and in addition it requires repeaters at longer increments and with less power consumption.

Now this won't apply in some other nations -- but I bet it does within the EU and other industrialized nations as well -- and that's where people have higher per-capita incomes necessary to pay those higher bills.

Within the next five to ten years from what I am seeing all over the place as I travel most rural electric customers will have this option.  The places I saw on this last trip where it obviously being deployed but not yet finished were astounding to me.  We're talking about very remote rural places -- and the utilities are putting in large loops of "reserve" so when there's damage such a tree taking out electric lines in a storm they can fix it with no splices back to the next repeater or distribution block.

This of course makes sense because the actual glass itself is quite cheap while the rest is not.

Nobody's going to pay $120/mo for service when the competitor is $50-60 and symmetrical gigabit where Starlink is ~200mbps down and asymmetrical.  This is the same problem the cable operators have; as the power companies do this they're in trouble because their 200/10 or 400/10 service for $80-100/mo is uncompetitive against 1g/1g for $50-60.  Starlink can't match the price and win because of the hardware requirement and its not competitive on price/performance for the "full" service either, so it has to be somewhat cheaper and enough so that it bites into the marginal money available to lower-income people or within the next few years all that's left is marine, roaming and the few who are truly off-grid in the US, which is damn few of the general population.