Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are not comparing the same thing here though. If you applied the same theoretical maximum method to all networking hardware (or even just core router class hardware) sold today you would arrive at numbers very very much in excess of a couple Pbit/s. For it to be really viable as a backbone it would need to be able to do several 100 Gbit/s from one location and that Starlink cannot do (or is built to do). A single…
Core routing hardware isn’t sold at multiple Pbit/s because no location on earth has that much traffic. Nobody is wasting that kind of money buying hardware when they don’t have fiber to make use of it. Starlink is aiming physically to eventually have 10+ Pbit/s worth of actual hardware because customers aren’t spread evenly across the globe so there’s inefficiencies involved. The only unfairness is comparing future…
Starlink doesn't have nice overview of actual specs of future satellites, so I can only use what people have figured out or what they have published. But you are right about the number of satellites, I looked at the wrong column (it was for phase 1 and not 3), so density will indeed be much higher, so from that perspective it will be somewhat more capable (depending on fast/slow their rollout is). And it's not clear if it would actually be cheaper for SpaceX to have such customers (since some of the traffic would go to the rest of the internet - requiring ground station resources) or go elsewhere on the planet (filling up inter-satellite capacity), but that's not too much different from how regular ISPs have to plan (some customers are cheaper for them than others).