Strand Consult published an article on its website that makes numerous predictions for broadband and related industries in 2025 and compares them to the company’s 2024 predictions. It’s fascinating and well worth reading. There is one prediction in particular that got me thinking.

In its 2024 predictions, Strand Consult compared Elon Musk’s Starlink to Jeff Bezos’s Kuiper. It said that Bezos had opened a burger bar, while Musk runs an interstellar McDonald’s. The 2025 observation agrees with that assessment.

My first reaction was a chuckle because it’s an amusing analogy. But then I started to think about the companies to see how accurate it is.

Starlink has a huge head start on Kuiper, with 6,000 satellites already in orbit. It’s a no-brainer to say that Starlink is far superior to the two companies that sit today. In fact, if Starlink is an interstellar McDonald’s, Kuiper is not even a menu at a burger bar yet.

But Strand is not talking about the current companies, but their long-term potential, and that gets more interesting. Kuiper has a huge hurdle ahead to launch enough satellites to have a viable service. All indications are that the company is on the verge of doing so, but until those birds are in the sky, Kuiper is not much more than a blueprint of a company.

But what about after Kuiper has enough satellites to offer decent residential broadband? Starlink will still be ahead as it keeps launching new satellites. Starlink plans will always have a lot more satellites than Kuiper. But Starlink is now beginning the cycle where a lot of its launches will be replacing satellites that have hit the short end of functional life.

The interesting thing about Starlink is that it seems ready to chase a wide range of new opportunities. It offers home broadband, but it’s expanded to also service mobile folks in campers and hikers. Starlink recently hinted that it’s going to chase other revenue opportunities, like encryption services for governments and communications infrastructure for militaries. This will greatly increase earnings per satellite but will divert a lot of broadband capacity to those big bandwidth users.

I think Strand’s observation is based on the belief that Kuiper is likely to concentrate on just selling broadband to people. It’s a boring product compared to many business lines that Starlink will be chasing. And that’s where I think the burger bar analogy gets interesting.

Jeff Bezos is a master of bundling. He makes money by getting people to buy multiple services, and it’s hard to think he won’t do this with satellite broadband. He might bundle this creatively with Amazon Prime! and other products, where the add-ons bring more profit than his satellite broadband alone.

I think the best way to think about Kuiper’s future is to compare it to the FWA cellular broadband being sold by Verizon and T-Mobile. The big ISPs all rail against FWA and say that it’s not adequate broadband. But the public is saying otherwise, and the two companies have taken the market by storm by adding over 10 million new customers while the rest of the ISPs in the country flounder.

My bet is that Kuiper broadband is going to be priced far below Starlink, and just like with FWA cellular broadband, a whole lot of ISP customers, including those who use Starlink today, are going to be lured by the price.

The Strand prediction feels right to me. Starlink will be doing big, exciting things around the world for governments and huge corporations. It will be selling connections with a wow factor. Meanwhile, Bezos might be selling nothing more than plain household broadband bundled with other everyday products—but selling a lot of it.

This makes me wonder if ten years from now, the pedestrian Kuiper might have more customers while Starlink might make more money. It’s a big possibility unless Bezos is lured into competing head-to-head with Starlink on the big stuff. I think both companies will claim they are being highly successful, and it will likely be true—with each following a different business model. That might be the inherent advantage of satellite broadband—unlike a normal ISP network that can only pursue opportunities in the immediate geographic vicinity—a satellite company can choose from a wide range of business plans.