Not to mention starlink is not a solution for internet for everyone on the planet: it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area, no matter how many satellites they have in their constellation. It's a useful piece of infrastructure, but it's far from the panacea people seem to think it is.

Starlink is already over-congested and physics says that it is not possible to scale it up to serve 100000000 subscribers let alone 5-6 billion or more. We would need some kind of physics breakthrough for that to scale properly, and I'm not even sure if physically it would even be possible to do that no matter what you threw at it. Starlink isn't magic as a lot of people seem to think it is.

> it cannot serve everyone in a densely populated area,

I also suspect that to be the case but in order to be more objective I wonder. What's the theoretical maximum bandwidth per square meter (or other unit area) that it can deliver?

Ground based infrastructure is much easier to justify in densely populated areas. So, dense areas get ground infra, and the dispersed rural population can get satellite infra