O3B's MPower constellation promises 10 Gbps terminals, but those terminals are very likely to go to big enterprise customers, as they will cost several $10k's.
Telesat's Lightspeed constellation is aimed at rural areas of Canada and 5G backhaul. To do the latter, they'll have to deliver at least 1 Gbps. Telesat's been in the game for a long time, so I wouldn't doubt that they'll deliver.
There's two Chinese constellations going up. They'll probably deliver anything and everything they can, but it remains to be seen what the satellite and terminal capacities will be. The west still has an edge here.
Starlink started with residential service but they'll try to expand into everything they can. One of applications I expect to see is to use Starlink to get data out of Teslas and back to the ML team so they can improve their self-driving code.
Kuiper? I mean, who knows. It's Amazon, so, they'll probably also try to expand into everything they can. I wouldn't be surprised if their delivery trucks will use it as backhaul.
You might notice that none of the above, so far, are actually aimed at connecting the unconnected. That's because the terminals, so far, are too expensive and too power-hungry. The only two initiative I'm aware of that are actually trying to connect the unconnected are:
OneWeb, which has truly global coverage (including the poles) and has a quite smart design, including working crosslinks and a relatively affordable terminal. Also, in the arctic, they can provide connectivity to militaries, so there's some good cashflow there.
Curvanet, an initiative by Tom Choi. They promise a sub $100 terminal that can run on 5 W (!) and does not require an ESA but can still deliver up to 50 Mbps. If they can actually pull this off I will buy a unit and stick on my roof just for fun. Also, if they succeed, they would be absolutely best-positioned in the market, as no one can (so far) match their cost or power consumption.
I believe it's both, but mostly accessibility. Access to internet is seen as limitation on growth for the large companies. Bandwith is certainly factor though when considering AMZN's media empire.
It's very unlikely to be faster internet (compared to what is generally available in urban/suburban America).
Ultimately, we're using radio similar to any 4G or 5G connection. There are some differences, but they probably work against satellite internet more than they work for it. Terrestrial wireless networks like Verizon or T-Mobile can easily split cells to get more capacity (install another tower and split traffic between them). It's harder to do that with satellites. Plus the satellites will be over ocean so much of the time when their capacity can't be used (and other satellites in the network will take that traffic). You do get better line-of-sight which is helpful, but the amount of capacity is somewhat limited. Elon Musk has even said that they'll "most likely" be able to serve 500,000 customers. "More of a challenge when we get into the several million user range."
These are unlikely to be services that offer a faster internet completion for people who are already well-served. Of course, there are a lot of people who aren't well-served.
Over the coming years, 5G home internet is going to become more common. T-Mobile is looking to sign up 7-8M customers which would make them the 4th largest home broadband provider. Verizon has announced that they want to cover 50M households for home internet by the end of 2024 (T-Mobile already offers home internet coverage to 30M households; also, remember that while there are 330M people in the US, there's only around 130M households). While 5G won't reach everywhere that satellite will, it will fill in some of the broadband gaps that we currently have. 5G will also offer an alternative to wired home internet in many areas.
A lot of the interest in satellite broadband is driven by government money. The US government is offering $9.2B to expand access to 5.2M home/businesses in this one instance and there's a lot more money where that came from. The Universal Service Fund in the US shells out billions every year to companies providing rural connectivity. It might not even be that there's much interest in these programs beyond government subsidies. Of course, once the satellites are traveling over other areas, might as well make the service available and get some extra money.
Musk has said that Starlink might require a $30B investment to be viable, but might become cash-flow positive after $5-10B. $5-10B is probably well within the realm of government subsidy in the US. I mean, the government will definitely be spending much more than that subsidizing rural broadband over the coming years, but whether Starlink/SpaceX will get that money remains to be seen.
I wouldn't say this is just about poor regions. There are plenty of far-flung places that I wouldn't classify as "poor" that don't have great internet.
I think an underrated part of this is applications for merchant ships and edge compute in LEO (though I don’t think Amazon has discussed this explicitly). The enterprise use cases could be interesting.
I think they're targeting accessibility and reduced latency on long journeys since light travels faster in air than wire. I don't believe they're targeting faster bandwidth though.
