If we’re speaking about urban areas or otherwise places with existing cellular infrastructure, then it only has some advantages as far as potentially overcoming signal attenuation (or just straight up blocking) in remote and/or mountainous regions. Eg the Rocky Mountains and thousands of other locations across the world. If you ever go to the Rockies, as soon as you really enter those valleys with paved roads all cell signals go poof and so does regular radio (both rely on radio transmission after all). Satellite radio still works though because it’s coming from, well, space. So unless you have a physical barrier above you like inside of a tunnel, you should get signal anywhere on earth’s surface as long as you can somehow reach a satellite’s signal.

It also requires far less terrestrial infrastructure (I think all you need is the receiver?). Building those towers for 4G, etc. obviously takes resources and the further into the wilderness you go the more expensive and impractical it becomes. You also have to run electricity to the towers or maintain stand alone generators… it can be extremely expensive and wasteful, as you might imagine. It’s also impractical and that means “it ain’t happening” under capitalism. No corporation will spend the resources just to ensure 10 families get 5G on their phone. And obviously the government has no interest in this either, although perhaps… they should? The ISPs did get an unimaginable amount, in the billions of dollars, to expand fiber and basically get internet into the homes of every single American… and they took that money like 15-20 years ago (I forget the exact year now) and… didn’t do jack shit basically. Verizon’s fiber network has hardly expanded in the Northeast US since like 2010-ish. Same across the country. It expands sometimes, in select areas, but yeah. Certainly not to the degree they were literally paid to do. And of course they kept that money and of course nothing ever happened from it and of course they said they need more money if people want fiber to every (practical) home. Gotta love America…

Better access to internet literally anywhere (once all the satellites are launched to cover the earth’s surface) is the selling point, something that cell tower technology struggles to provide. It also could potentially reduce costs (no infrastructure requirements which is massive) for developing nations. The theoretical possibilities and positive potential in something that fills the niche that Starlink promised is honestly really cool and something worth pursuing, but not by private corporations. Because if Starlink (so, Elon…) was successful in this endeavor, they would own access to the link between every person in countries that use it and the rest of the world. They could shut it off, spy on it, charge astronomical rates… not good stuff. I do believe it’s worthwhile though for humanity to keep trying to solve this issue, but do it in a responsible way, one that ideally doesn’t burn satellites up every few years…? And isn’t privately owned, especially by one single dumbass.

Lines Musk’s pockets.