There are a bunch of small companies building demonstrators right now. Even before SpaceX started Starlink, there were companies trying to do the same thing. Sp

There are a bunch of small companies building demonstrators right now. Even before SpaceX started Starlink, there were companies trying to do the same thing. SpaceX seems to be the most successful so far but there is still a lot of work to do to build out a network as reliable as GEO comms or something like Iridium. There are a bunch of different kinds of services offered or soon to be offered by other companies. Some only handle small text messages at like 4800 baud (like Orbcomm) and some others are planning commercial cell towers in space (like AST). Everyone has different needs so not everyone is going to require a blistering fast, low latency, high availability link. So while I applaud SpaceX going for the gold to deliver such service, it's not for most people and is overkill for most applications required a satellite uplink.