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Comment by jpgvm | Hacker News Reader

It's possible for it to be faster over long distances because light travels faster in vacuum than in glass fibre and likely less hops in space vs terrestrially where transit would need to go via several carriers to reach far destinations.

That is putting aside ground stations located in areas which themselves have poor transit which is the main problem with regional variability of performance I would imagine, though could also be congestion if they are oversubscribing in those regions. i.e too much density of terminals.

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Lower latency is very, very far from the same thing as more bandwidth. Certain customers can benefit from the difference in latency. Not you, though.

Starlink will make those who would benefit (hedge funds, mainly) pay through the nose to get it. And, pay even more to keep somebody else from getting it. Probably they will charge a huge premium for 1ms faster than fiber, and 100x more for each ms better than that.

You may be certain they will not use that extra income to provide you better value.

Their stated plan is to enable the inter-satellite links for all customers. This will allow them to reach many more customers with lower operational costs. This would probably allow for more profit than just charging a few customers a premium for lower latency service.

Enabling the inter-satellite links for all customers doesn't guarantee they'll use much more expensive cold-potato routing though. It makes no sense to cross the ocean on 20 Gbps space lasers when you could use a 20 Tbps fiber cable.

Right. Any traffic that can be dumped to the downlink will. But it anyway costs nothing but RAM to stall your packets just enough to satisfy your service level agreement, keeping the channel clear for actual paying traffic.

Sending early is of course always OK. Those paying for that millisecond need it reliably every time, so not much of your traffic would need to be stalled. Maybe 10%. And maybe only while markets are open.

I 100% agree with this.

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