Starlink feared as emerging threat to broadband service providers

Starlink may have started out as a gap-filler in rural areas, but its reach, pricing, and capacity seem to indicate that it intends to be a much bigger player on the broadband stage, according to cable industry executives. Starlink is reaching more deeply into suburban and urban areas where it has spare capacity, it's ramping up at retail, and it's preparing to deploy bigger low-Earth orbit satellites packed with a lot more capacity once its massive Starship rocket is ready. And it's spending billions on spectrum through acquisition and also sizing up other opportunities, including the upcoming AWS-3 spectrum auction. In 2020, Elon Musk stressed that Starlink "is not some huge threat to the telcos" because it focuses on hard-to-reach areas. Six years and several actions later, what does Starlink mean for cable operators and other terrestrial broadband service providers? Trouble, says Hans Geerdes, a principal strategist at CableLabs.