With spaceX's new proposal you are looking at 2.2 ms as the minimum earth to ground delay + presumably something up to 15-16,000 km (15-16 ms) if your packets had to travel to the exact opposite side of the globe. Add in a 1-2 ms delay for each hop between satellites due to the actual switching and he could be much much much faster for intercontinental packets.
Plus I'm assuming under this scenario that there will be hundreds of terrestrial transmittal points to use versus just a few base stations to make the terrestrial hops even less.
I'd wager that financial market trading traffic alone could pay for a significant portion of this bill at super premium rates, especially overseas traders. Not to mention traffic from ships, planes, rural 1st world locations all paying a premium. They can implement zone pricing pretty easily because they will always be able to able to triangulate a transmission down to the inch. With a network that dense it would greatly surpass the accuracy of the existing GPS constellation.
So I get a call one day to initiate the process of getting new machines built for an agent who had his machines destroyed in a Kansas tornado. As I'm recording all the details I ask him if he had backup tapes off site and he says no, his office was in the front part of his residence (common for small towns). So I then say "you know, those tapes are really durable in their cases. Do you think they could be buried somewhere intact?". The agent pauses for a moment and says "yup, I think you're right. But my foundation is a clean slab so I don't know where in the county they are."
I guess you have to have a sense of humor about storms to be an Insurance agent in the plains.
I've always relayed this story when people bring this up. There are situations that can occur that could cause you not to be able to recover this data.
The only possible solution I can think is if you have a separate storm shelter away from your house where fire (and tornado's) can't reach. But even then you'd potentially have to worry about floods.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood