>Elon: "We'll have some small number of customers in Los Angeles but we can't do a lot of customers in Los Angeles because the bandwidth per cell is simply not high enough" also "I wanna be clear, it's not like Starlink is a huge threat to telcos. I want to be super clear. It is not. In fact it will be helpful to telcos because Starlink will serve the hardest to serve customers that telcos otherwise have trouble doing with landlines or even with cell radio stations, cell towers."
That links to two timestamps in a 47 minute livestream by Elon Musk. There's no canonical answer on starlink.com.... because that site has basically no info on it.
Last time telcos were taken on we got Google Fiber. I'm skeptical if the long-term play is to stick with servicing just rural customers. Also telcos get paid quite an insane amount of money to service rural areas poorly. I'm not so sure they'll see it as "not a threat".
It's also important to position the company in this light to prevent telecos being able to lobby hard against Starlink.
If Starlink had come out saying they wanted to provide access to everyone the telecos would have came in and said Starlink has to also allow reselling of access like how they're forced to (at least in Canada).
It is a lot easier to show up and just tell everyone, "Remember how rural areas aren't profitable for you? No worries, we'll take this trouble from you."
