Critical infrastructure dependent on a single private vendor's whim
Pain point
Military/humanitarian operations reliant on Starlink can be switched off unilaterally. "Starlink needs to be taken over for national security reasons" (560); "Not the first time Starlink has been leveraged against the Ukrainians" (243) — explicit unmet need for an alternative.
Signal
Moderate-strong (11.1K upvotes) but politically charged and the buyer is a government, not a consumer.
Opportunity
Not a startup for most. Realistic adjacent play: **multi-constellation failover routing** — a terminal/software layer that auto-fails over between Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb, Iridium, and LTE, so no single provider is a kill switch. Sell to NGOs, maritime, defense integrators, broadcasters. Feasibility: **hard** (hardware + partnerships), but the software-only SD-WAN-for-satcom version is tractable.
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