I like that several companies are competing to do this, so nobody will have monopoly power for long. Probably SpaceX will have lower operating costs, but Musk wants to siphon off ROI for his Mars, er, project.<p>Probably the other players will be better capitalized, but have more pressure to get to break-even. Differences in peering arrangements could have big effects on usefulness, as will bandwidth capacity, which seems likely to be limited in SpaceX's first system. They will probably sell it, as the video suggests, on latency for low bandwidth traffic, meaning it is likely not to be cost-effective for video streaming. It is hard to guess whether any on-board cache would turn out to be useful.<p>The first to deploy will be a dancing bear: it will matter less how good it is than that it works at all. But the first will also get the first hard experience needed for their second system.