Hmm. Wasn’t starlink supposed to propagate directly from satellite to satellite around the world? Or is that still not the case? The speed of light is only reached in vacuum (it’s slower in fiberglass, like 66%) and afaik one of the selling points was that they could do high-frequency trading faster between the stock exchanges of london and new york. And the reason why they use low earth orbit. So I assumed this should significantly reduce ping.
I didn’t closely follow Starlink-related news recently, but regardless, on such a high distance and such a low height I expect the very curvature of the Earth being a problem with direct transmission of signals from one satellite to the other. May be wrong again, though, didn’t calculate.
Also fair on speed of light. However, even if we don’t count travelling up, down, and extra equipment, and take 33% improvement at face value, this turns 80-150ms ping into 53-100ms, which is still clearly not good enough for competitive gaming.
Hmm. Wasn’t starlink supposed to propagate directly from satellite to satellite around the world? Or is that still not the case? The speed of light is only reached in vacuum (it’s slower in fiberglass, like 66%) and afaik one of the selling points was that they could do high-frequency trading faster between the stock exchanges of london and new york. And the reason why they use low earth orbit. So I assumed this should significantly reduce ping.
Fair criticisms!
I didn’t closely follow Starlink-related news recently, but regardless, on such a high distance and such a low height I expect the very curvature of the Earth being a problem with direct transmission of signals from one satellite to the other. May be wrong again, though, didn’t calculate.
Also fair on speed of light. However, even if we don’t count travelling up, down, and extra equipment, and take 33% improvement at face value, this turns 80-150ms ping into 53-100ms, which is still clearly not good enough for competitive gaming.
Yeah I haven’t followed either why I’m curious if any of the claimed benefits materialized.