And if OneWeb fails, SpaceX still made good money launching them. And if OneWeb is kind of successful and a duopoly between StarLink and OneWeb develops, SpaceX makes money from both companies.
Selling shovels is a great strategy, even if you own a gold mine.
I wonder to what degree satellite internet is winner-takes-all.
They are competing for customers but, at least last I checked, they weren't putting a ton of bandwidth into orbit (compared to existing land based stuff). Maybe they'll both end up just selling as much as they can produce.
It's probably less winner-takes-all than ground based internet. At scale, putting infrastructure into space is a much lower barrier to entry than putting a fiber line into every household.
The limiting factor will be spectrum allocations. You only have so much bandwidth per area, giving an advantage to those that either have more directional antennas or more spectrum available.
Fiber to the home doesn't have any technical barriers, but localized corruption creates massive barriers to entry. (It's much easier to do fiber to the home in rural areas than in US metros)
Satellite internet has the opposite problem. If it ends up winning it will be a testament to dysfunctional governments around the world.
