I’ve been thinking about the long-term trajectory for satellite broadband in rural areas. I saw a recent estimate that Starlink has around 2.6 million customers in the U.S. and is still growing. I have to think that most of these customers live in places that don’t have a fast broadband alternative to satellite broadband.

I got to thinking about satellite after a recent conversation with an Uber driver. She lives in a small rural town in my county, and she and most of her neighbors use Starlink today. She says that it works adequately well for the way her family uses broadband, but that it’s far too expensive. She expects to be changing to fiber in 2026 when Frontier builds fiber in her area. She said she already knows people nearby who changed to Frontier fiber that was built in 2025. I researched her neighborhood, and Frontier is building fiber with the help of a broadband grant funded by the State of North Carolina.

There has already been a lot of rural fiber built with grant funding. There are fiber construction projects underway from CAF II, RDOF, ReConnect, NTIA Tribal, and EA-CAM. States awarded a huge amount of grants from the Capital Project Funds, from ARPA, and from State general funds. My best estimate is that these various programs will fund the construction of fiber to around 8 million rural fiber passings. My estimates are that there are still 2.2 million passings to be built from these programs in 2026 and another 1.2 million passings in 2027. On top of these programs, it looks like there will be roughly another 2.5 million rural fiber passings coming from the BEAD grants that have been tentatively announced.

I don’t have a good estimate for the coming passings from rural fixed wireless construction, but there is still construction of WISP networks being funded by RDOF and other grant programs. It looks like BEAD has tentatively awarded grants for fixed wireless to a little less than half a million new passings. WISPs are building networks with speed capabilities in the range of 500 Mbps download, which is a lot faster than what is being delivered by Starlink today.

These various grant programs are going to cover a lot of rural America with fast broadband, and that is going to eat into the potential market for Starlink and Amazon LEO. Starlink faces the issue of having a price that is significantly higher than the large majority of ISPs that are building grant-funded networks. That’s something that the company can fix by lowering rates. But even with lower rates, Starlink will not match the speeds of the grant-funded networks, at least with current satellite technology.

We have no real ideas about the pricing and speed capabilities of Amazon LEO. There is a lot of speculation that the company will create interesting bundles for satellite broadband with Amazon video and shopping.

The bottom line of my speculation is that the U.S. households that will be interested in satellite broadband will be shrinking over the next few years as millions of rural homes get faster broadband alternatives from fiber or fixed wireless.

It’s also likely that there will be serious competition between Starlink and Amazon LEO as they each try to lock down a share of the U.S. market. Will the two companies collude to keep prices high, or will they devolve into the kind of fierce competition we see in the cellular industry today?

On a worldwide basis, both U.S. satellite providers are going to see significant competition from the Guowang (the National Network) from China and the Quinfan (Thousand Sails) constellation from Shanghai. My best guess is that these two companies will undercut the prices of the U.S. providers to try to corner the markets in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Starlink has a unique market opportunity today since it brings the only fast broadband option to huge numbers of homes. But in North America and Europe, those opportunities will decrease as faster terrestrial networks are constructed. Starlink’s unique monopoly disappears when Amazon LEO enters the market, and possibly gets really competitive when other worldwide constellations come online.