Starlink Best for Rural Areas, Analysts Say
The company is planning another test launch of its Starship rocket this week
WASHINGTON, July 13, 2026 – SpaceX is planning another test flight of its Starship rocket this Thursday on July 16, the company announced Saturday.
The Federal Aviation Administration also closed its review Monday of a May Starship launch in which a booster failed to land safely. That closure was necessary before the company could launch again.
The Thursday launch will carry 20 Starlink V3 satellites and deploy them, but they’ll burn up in the atmosphere after attempting to connect with the existing constellation.
Starship can launch larger gear than SpaceX's current Falcon 9 rocket, like the V3 satellites. The aim is for Starship to be completely reusable and dramatically reduce launch costs.
SpaceX is asking the Federal Communications Commission to launch 100,000 V3 units to support its broadband service, compared to the more than 9,000 V2 satellites currently in use. The company told the agency last week its new constellation would “deliver extremely low-latency and multi-gigabit symmetrical throughput for consumers, enterprises, and government users and billions of AI-powered devices around the world.”
Still, even with much improved performance from new satellites, MoffettNathanson analysts said in a Monday report that Starlink was likely to remain a mostly rural service. Last week, New Street Research said it was not dismissing the potential threat from Starlink to terrestrial ISPs, but also noted the company had been raising prices recently after a series of rate cuts.
“So far, we haven’t seen any major impact on the wired broadband operators in the US mostly because Starlink has been focused on rural markets where customers have few alternatives,” New Street analysts wrote in a July 9 report. The report was authored by David Barden, Vikash Harlalka, and Ryan Smyth.
In an analysis of Recon Analytics data, New Street found that in the first half of 2026, 17 percent of new Starlink customers said they had never had broadband before, a portion that’s been slowly increasing over time since 2023.
Starlink has been competing better over time against cable and fixed wireless operators, New Street noted, with 20 percent and 15 percent of new Starlink subscribers coming from each. Cable operators in turn take about 50 percent of Starlink users that switch off the service.
That data, especially the new-to-broadband customers, implies Starlink “still more of a rural phenomenon,” according to New Street.
In a report on Monday, analysts at MoffettNathanson argued that even with big performance improvement that will likely come with widespread V3 deployment, Starlink is likely to continue to be best suited to its rural niche in the next several years.
“Starlink will deliver performance levels far exceeding those of GEO satellites like
HughesNet, WISPs (wireless ISPs common in rural areas), and DSL. It will deliver
performance comparable to fixed wireless access (FWA),” they wrote. “It will remain significantly disadvantaged versus fiber (FTTH) and Cable.”
The problem isn’t necessarily the capacity of each satellite, they wrote, but the number of households that can be served in an area given Starlink’s constellation size and number of beams per satellite.
The report assumed 16 spot beams for V3 satellites, the same as think tank X-Lab estimates the V2 units are capable of. It also noted that SpaceX applied for a much larger 100,000-satellite constellation, but said that if the FCC approved the project it would be unlikely to materialize in the near future
V3 will be a big capacity improvement, but consumer data consumption is projected to rise, they wrote.
The report was written by MoffettNathanson’s Craig Moffett, Julie Zhu, and Nick Del Deo. They said in areas denser than 210 households per square mile (much of the U.S.), a constellation of 15,000 V3s might not be able to serve the entire market at current usage levels.
The company had about 2.7 million subscribers in the U.S. earlier this year, and the MoffettNathanson analysts expect that to hit 9.5 million by the end of 2030.
