Starcraft on my dial-up!

If by "competitive" you mean anyone who plays any sort of real-time game such as RTS, FPS, or even real-time mobile game. Many consumers may take a while to figure out that latency is the reason they lose/die when it doesn't look like they should, but they will feel the effects immediately.

Granted users in rural areas are likely the most apt to benefit from this service and those users don't likely fantastic internet to begin with. However, if SpaceX markets this to areas with decent quality internet they're likely to get a bad reputation for "crappy" internet.

I play League of Legends and have only DSL but my ping is only 35 ms and I can't complain -- many other players have it worse than me.

What did make it impossible for me to get kills was having 30 ms of latency in my display system. I think the network latency is well-compensated (if the typical user has 50 ms of latency, just delay me by 20 ms) but the display latency kills me. When I switched to a different monitor I started playing much better in about five games.

I think the game generates a 10 MB log for a 30 minute session so the bandwidth requirement is not much.

I had the same experience playing Titanfall earlier; in that case turning on the "Game Mode" on the TV turned me from someone who couldn't win at all to somebody who could get halfway up the ladder.

If the latency is 700ms you can’t even have a decent Skype call.

Try having an RDP session to fix Windows servers based in Australia with 400+ ms latency (Europe is unfortunately nowhere near Australia) on your GUI, the ordeal will leave a permanent scar on your psyche.

I guess it depends on the game being played. When I played C&C in the 90s over modem, the latency was huge but it wasn't a major concern for that type of game.

Now that I play real time sports, and I'm no professional, it still makes a big difference in my enjoyment of the game when I'm playing at home with ethernet and top tier internet service vs playing at my parent's house on wifi and basic internet. The lag can really affect my ability to play my best and it sucks losing because you don't have a low latency connection.

That said, I'm very curious to see what the latency will be, because if it's within a reasonable range it could be acceptable. Either way, I don't think even casual gamers will have a significant impact on their sales, but it will have some if the lag is too great for some of today's games.

Terrestrial microwave has almost the same speed as light in a vacuum, so I think it's possible a microwave network beats Starlink.

I’ve read the paper that started this idea of Starlink being a low latency alternative for hft (http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf) There are a couple of problems with the paper. The first is that they establish a range of acceptable latency as existing between the great circle route and the fastest ping time on the internet between two points. For example they found that NY to London was 75ms round trip on the internet. However the long time standard bearer for a pure fiber path had been 64ms until the latest gen cables arrived in 2016. At that point the latency was sub 60 ... very comparable to the 55ms great circle route. But it’s important to understand that the starlink point to point route will be constantly changing — so only in one or two instances will that latency even come close to the existing terrestrial routes. More often than not the latency would trend closer to the 70ms range - well beyond anything considered competitive either in the current generation of routes much less the prior generation. It’s as if the authors simply had no idea about the hft market and what latencies might be needed (all of which has been published publicly). But there’s another problem with the study. For the solution to work, spacex would need to dedicate one of its laser links to enable communications across other satellites and dedicate that capacity to this application. And further, the study did not address the issue of optronic delays within the satellites. Most microwave manufacturers care little about hft latency tolerances and intermachine delays can be 1-2ms per hop. Assuming starlink to not to be much different (although I don’t know this to be true or not) that would definitely add even more latency to the equation. So all in all while it’s interesting and will do amazing things for consumers and enterprises, I don’t see starlink being a competitive hft solution unless the route in questions is really long and a lot of other engineering stuff can be made to work to enable it. Call me a skeptic but I don’t think we will see it.