Comment by ttul
6 hours ago
Starlink seems to provision capacity by locking your service to one address at a time; presumably, this means they have enough capacity for the customers in each physical area. By contrast, mobile networks have to contend with highly mobile terminals and highly volatile demand.
I would wager that today’s Starlink is better able to cope during a fixed line outage in an area simply because they at least have already provisioned capacity for the subscribers in that area, whereas mobile operators operate closer to capacity limits at all times and do not have the ability to scale when everyone is tethering suddenly.
I don't think mobility matters during a broadband outage. The problem is people failing over to cellular. (If anything, mobile terminals may require cellular providers to provision extra headroom, which helps during an outage.)
Starlink will have the same problem unless it provisions extra capacity for users on standby plans. The plan is so cheap that I can't imagine they're provisioning much.