⚠ The Ground Keeps Catching UpModerate threat

The territory where Starlink is the only option is real but bounded, and its edges are being eaten from the ground up. Government-subsidized fiber, fixed wireless, and ever-expanding cellular coverage keep reaching further into the rural and suburban markets that were Starlink's early hunting grounds, and terrestrial broadband, where it exists, is usually faster and cheaper. Starlink's truly defensible core — mid-ocean, in-flight, deep-rural, crisis, and military — is lucrative but smaller than the total subscriber count suggests, and the mass-market consumer additions that drive the headline growth — most of the climb to 10.3M subscribers¹ — sit in exactly the zone where the ground network is advancing to meet them.