There are often way more than 4 million people within 150 miles of populated cities in the States (which consequently is also a large portion of the population). For many people 2-4mbps per cell is less than 1 bps which I think is unreal.
My guess is their estimates are off and that satellite net speeds don’t correlate directly to regular network speeds because of all the other factors. If it’s actually 2-4Mbps… yikes, this would only be useful when you’re far away from populated areas (which in all reality could be their intended use case)
Only using it in very remote areas that literally have no other communications available is exactly the point of the T-Mobile/Starlink service. Obviously they're not trying to outperform terrestrial cellular networks with satellite comms. So mostly the same use-case as the Apple/Globalstar service.
Except from the sounds of it the Apple service actually is something like 1bps, since they stated in the video it can take "only" 15 seconds to send one message. (assuming an emergency SOS message size of 15 bytes when compressed)
My guess is their estimates are off and that satellite net speeds don’t correlate directly to regular network speeds because of all the other factors. If it’s actually 2-4Mbps… yikes, this would only be useful when you’re far away from populated areas (which in all reality could be their intended use case)