As long as they're geolocking the terminals I wouldn't be surprised if they subsidize the hell out of it for lower income countries - as long as they can eventually pay off the UT costs and whatever overhead is required per customer, making some money from the area is better than none. Might have to wait on UT costs to come way down with mass production though, as well as inter-satellite links (so they don't have to drop ground stations in middle of nowhere).
Its not the price of the UT, its the price of the service and the corollary user equipment (like a computer). Sub saharan Africa is a good example, where few users are going to ever have direct Starlink service since, for the foreseeable future at least, individual users are almost all on mobiles. So far more likely is local MNOs doing the starlnk-on-a-cell-tower thing which, while providing Starlink revenue through more stable and higher value commercial service agreements, will also necessarily result in a fraction of the total contracts.
Yes, the countries may do the subsidizing of those MNO towers, but you can guarantee SpaceX will not be doing that level of subsidies. Unlike a theoretical service from Amazon or Facebook which have incentive to subsidize because of adjacent revenue vehicles, Starlink has to make all the monies of monthly service fees...with the explicit goal of making enough monies to go to Mars.
Otherwise every time a satellite passes over that region it's "losing money" (really, just failing to make 100% utilization of potential income streams).
That's not really how a constellation works. Only over the densest user areas will satellites be operating "at 100%". Over less dense user areas, cumulative service demand will be a fraction of total constellation capacity because the satellites (and in general, the constellation) will be sized for the higher density areas. For every ~90 min orbit, a Starlink sat will really only be near service capacity for maybe 5-10 minutes. Another 5-20 minutes will be some degree of service (and, lucky for those folks, pretty awesome service), and the rest of the time is really just solar harvesting with occasional EP burns for maintenance and/or COLA.
That said, and this hasn't occurred to me before (perhaps it has to others), ISL backhaul of otherwise non-starlink traffic could be a potential revenue stream, especially across low traffic 'virtual arteries'. There's probably not a
lot of traffic between South Africa and Australia for instance, but by and large the few hundred sats between South Africa and Australia aren't going to be doing much of anything anyway...
Russia, or at least Roscosmos, wants to launch their own. It may never get funded, but they've been making noise about it lately, and naturally how superior it will be in every way - they're really embracing the stereotype of russia/soviet PR with it, as Roscosmos often does.
There's very little noise on Sphere or anything else coming out of Russia recently, but happy for links all the same. Most of the noise I've seen lately is "we'e going to fine you if you use Starlink in Russia"...which as an aside is kind of stupid because Starlink isn't going to broadcast into Russia if its not approved to do so in the first place.
FYI you can get two way satellite internet in Russia now via legacy operators, including
western operators (Asiasat,
Eutelsat,
SES), and also two way western services from Iridium and Globalstar. There are a number of non-Russian satellites broadcasting into and receiving from Russian and former soviet territories. Obviously not Starlink quality, but precedent nonetheless.
Certainly, far more likely is Russia would approve the Chinese service and not Starlink, but that's assuming one of the Chinese constellations actually makes it...
