Why would they need 85% capacity for emergeny only SMS. How many people are getting into trouble on their boats??

Lots of people get into trouble all the time and don't have a PLB or satellite messenger on them. It's not just on boats – hikers and climbers in the mountains get themselves into dangerous situations frequently.

Globalstar is probably preparing for an influx of new users to their service who would otherwise not own a satellite-capable device.

Boats? Denver to California is basically only covered if you can see a paved road… and their aren’t a ton of paved roads. Let’s not get into Canada, even on the main highway there are plenty of dead spots.

Also, don’t overestimate their bandwidth. I rented a sat-phone once for weather updates mid Atlantic. Text only emails could take a minute to ul/dl with full reception.

I think the UL/DL is more due to the design of the network (I’m talking about Iridium data packets). The connection isn’t persistent like a computer in many cases. For example, a handset does both passive and active checks at some interval rather than the satellites pushing messages down as they’re available.

edit: It’s also worth mentioning that the bandwidth is very limited, but I thought it worth calling out the above

Or how little is the service being used now?

It looks like Globalstar currently has around 700,000 subscribers including Commercial IoT. Apple sells what, 200 million iPhones a year? Most of those won’t be Pros or sold in the US but it’s still going to be massive numbers.

Because the network has barely any capacity as it is. Think early telephone modem days.

They also mentioned for "more casual usage" the Find My features via satellite connection.