I have high hopes for the execution of this.

There's only one decent provider where I am, and when a smaller ISP tries to come in the politics begin to keep them out. This would circumvent that entirely, and hopefully make things much more competitive.

In the areas of the earth where the satellites are not approved for use, are they forced to turn off the transmitters on the satellite?

Also I’m not clear how spacex network connects back to the ground. I would assume they would want to simply bounce between the sattelite and a ground station. Meaning they would need to build a ground station every 100 miles or so such that any satellite can simply bounce down to a ground base station that has roughly 10X the bandwidth of the satellite.. I’ve heard people mention the idea of using the satellite network itself to back haul to a few more centralized hubs but that would wreck the bandwidth..

The idea is to have the satellites communicate directly with each other, keeping the number of ground stations to a minimum.

One idea is to use laser communications between satellites, as well as ground stations.