Most of Africa and central Asia cannot afford a terminal. Australian outback is too sparsely populated to matter, economically.
You seem to imagine Starlink will be motivated to behave better than other telecomm companies. I have no clue why you imagine this. I expect the more power they amass, the more they will use. On their own behalf, not yours.
You think subscriber agreements will permit using it as the uplink for a local ISP? Do they now?
Seems like that would cost rather more. You could imagine customer ... sparse ... areas might get a discount, but you could also imagine not. Anyway they will need to maximize revenue to pay for lofting new satellites, what, 4000/y? 6000/y? as those age out.
1) hell yes starlinks will be shared by entire remote villages, it happened in the volcano eruption in Tonga.
2) starlink would love the positive press of third world connectivity enablement
3) remember, starlink is a low-flying satellite flotilla. So the satellites over remote expansive areas aren't being used as much, and so revenue from central africa can be priced differently to get whatever you can out of the geographic areas the satellites fly over.
Revenue is revenue, even if it's only 10% of your US revenue. As you say, the goal will be to get revenue for the time the satellite is aloft. If you get a million/day while it passes over the US, then 100,000/day as it passes over South America, well, that's still money.
Africa is 1.2 billion people, South America is 422 million, the satellites fly over regardless. 1.6 billion people is a lot of potential revenue, even if third world.
Starlink is limited in how much attention they can devote to such customization, and even by how complicated their billing and payment systems would get. So picking up those subscribers, even where substantial money is in principle on the table, will necessarily lag far behind.
Its really not that complicated. Sure its some software you have to make, but lets not pretend this is some incredibly complex thing.
And they don't have to pick all subscribes now, they just need to continually grow subscribers over the next couple of years and add 1 country after the other. Exactly as they have been doing so far.
> You think subscriber agreements will permit using it as the uplink for a local ISP?
I think in the richer countries those will be special agreements, but in many places it will just be done and SpaceX will likely not spend much resources to prevent it.
> lofting new satellites, what, 4000/y? 6000/y? as those age out.
Yes, but their cost curves of all the major pieces of the puzzle get cheaper with each generation as volume goes up. Starship will make a huge difference, ground antennas will go closer and closer to being consumer electronics and they are working on sat mass manufacture.
People in the developing world don't care about those agreements. Ultimately there's probably a way to make the numbers work, like charging 5x the price for 20 customers sharing one dish.
You seem to imagine Starlink will be motivated to behave better than other telecomm companies. I have no clue why you imagine this. I expect the more power they amass, the more they will use. On their own behalf, not yours.