Powered by Hype, Hovering Over Reality

It’s 2025, and market analysts everywhere are looking skyward, not for inspiration, but for validation. A now-popular forecast claims the satellite internet market will leap from USD 14.56 billion in 2025 to USD 33.44 billion by 2030, expanding at a tidy 18.1% CAGR. Cue the angelic chorus of VCs, telecom execs, and press-release writers. This forecast, parroted across ResearchAndMarkets, BusinessWire, and MarketsandMarkets, reads like gospel, until you look sideways at the pile of alternate projections saying, “Hold up.”

Some forecasts have the market topping out near USD 24.6B by 2030. Others, like MarketResearchFuture, jump the shark entirely, calling for USD 186.84 billion by 2034. That’s that’s full delusion with LEO latency. Meanwhile, Maximize Market Research quietly projects just USD 15.07 billion by 2030. Quite the range for a market allegedly “dominated” by household names like SpaceX, SES, and Viasat.

Speaking of SpaceX, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest has already crowned them the $2.5 trillion darling of 2030, because nothing says financial sobriety like tacking on a trillion or two. Starlink’s ambitions are grand, no doubt, but the actual rollout is still working through latency bugs, regulatory tangles, and inconsistent quality in less photogenic regions.

Let’s talk about “Rest of the World”, that handy bucket used when market analysts want to claim explosive growth without having to separate Congo from Colombia. Latin America and Africa are framed as boundless growth frontiers because they’re “underserved.” Translation: hard to regulate, slow to build ground infrastructure, and lucrative if you get in early and cheap. But who’s paying for this? Local governments with bandwidth dreams and infrastructure budgets written in chalk?

India is one case study worth watching. After a regulatory skirmish between Elon Musk’s Starlink and Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio, the Indian government has tried to attract more players with an open-spectrum satellite policy. Jio has cleared major hurdles to roll out satellite internet, while Musk’s ambitions have been pulled back due to bureaucratic friction and nationalism dressed as spectrum policy.

In Europe, Brussels has decided it’s no longer cute letting Elon own the orbital lanes. The EU is building a Starlink rival with tax money and a techno-nationalist grin. Even mobile operators are getting twitchy, investing in satellite tech to patch “not spots” where 5G conveniently forgets to show up. This is an old-fashioned land grab, except the land is 500 kilometers up and there are no borders.

All this maneuvering rests on one quietly ignored assumption: that the bulk of satellite internet users will be villagers streaming Netflix and farmers checking crop prices. In reality, the real clients are offshore oil rigs, container ships, forward operating bases, and remote mining operations, all with actual budgets and no patience for signal fade. That humanitarian fig leaf about e-learning in Nigeria? That’s how you sell this to regulators and soften the image of militarized orbital deployments.

The “multi-orbit” segment is another masterclass in overpromise. Analysts say it’ll be the fastest-growing due to its magical mix of GEO coverage, LEO latency, and MEO compromise. What they don’t say is that juggling those constellations takes serious interoperability engineering, fancy beamforming voodoo, and a lot of corporate trust in each other, which space firms aren’t exactly known for.

There’s also deafening silence on spectrum congestion, de-orbiting failures, and the geopolitical sensitivity of placing thousands of private satellites over foreign airspace.

Apparently, the plan is:
launch first,
ask forgiveness later.