That's what I'm saying though. All of ruraldom doesn't have the density put together to make this work.
Satellites don't need density. Just the opposite in fact.
A business going into an area only cares about density so that they can cover the network costs to reach them.
Wire businesses, not satellite.
But, I still don't think it adds up to enough to fund a 4000 sat network and ground system, because there aren't enough rural users with enough money to make it work.
The hundreds of thousands of existing rural satellite internet customers argues differently. Backhaul revenue is expected to be huge. It's not my field, but those in the know say it will be larger than end-consumer revenue.
The roll out looks like this: First 6 years: 680 sats per year. That's 3.9bln for sats/launches/licenses(USA only) + at least another bln to operate the network. After that, imagine replacement of the original fleet at 400/year which is 2.2bln/year + operations which will be much more now (scales with number of sats) + 1.5bln/year.
The logical conclusion is that these numbers are wildly out of sync with SpaceX's projections. Musk has said the entire constellation will cost around $10 billion.
Network ops $1 billion per year? That seems... extraordinarily high, especially at first.
My guess, 200 launch the first year, 400 the second, 600 the third, 700 the fourth, fifth, and sixth and seventh. Revenue starts to trickle in the first year, by the 2nd year the continental US is covered and huge numbers of customers are coming on board, by the third, revenue is close to covering capital outlay, by the forth it's profitable, then wildly so in the years thereafter.
Maybe they charge themselves dead cost for a reused launches (or play shell games to achieve the same). Dead cost for a reused core may be in $15 million range. Maybe the sats cost just $2 million each, maybe 30 will fit in a fairing from day 1. Each in-orbit sat would then cost a scant $2.5 million.
Even that is higher than Musk's $10 billion dollar program cost estimate.