[amluto]

I disagree.

Regulations or not, building a terrestrial network is expensive. Once all the permits are granted, it still costs on the order of $5/foot ($25k/mile) to buy and install fiber. (Cost varies with labor costs and by installation type, obviously.) And you need backhaul, multiplexers or switches, etc.

In a fairly dense area with a lot of customers and proximity to existing transit providers, fiber is very cost effective. In a rural area with long last-mile links and few customers, fiber is more expensive and satellite can win.

Starlink has another potential issue in dense areas: limited bandwidth. The beams from satellites that are near each other can interfere with each other, so doubling the number of satellites may not double the aggregate bandwidth available in a given small, densely populated area. In contrast, fiber scales better than linearly up to huge bandwidth: installing 10 strands of fiber is much less than twice as expensive as installing five strands, and the bandwidth available per single-mode strand has been increasing over time without any requirement to use fancier fiber.