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Comment by valuearb | Hacker News Reader

SpaceX is going to crush both of them.

I am not a fan of Comcast, but I'm not switching my hard-wired Internet for satellite Internet which is high-latency and subject to weather conditions.

LEO service is low-latency. Light's got a few hundred clicks to go, and much of that in hard vacuum. About 1-4 milliseconds, call it 2-8 round-trip ping.

Geosync is a whole 'nother ballgame. It's a quarter second outbound, and a half-second round-trip ping (earth-bird-earth and back).

Radio talks through clouds just fine.

1000 miles in a vacuum is 5.36 ms. Don't forget that it's up and back two times so you're looking at just over 21 ms waiting on light. The packet actually needs to go onto the Internet at that point too.

Sure, though 20 ms getting you to a fat node is pretty good, especially if you're in an underserved area. The net time cost is actually the difference between this and straight-line overland distance, which is both not in vacuum and hits node latency.

10 ms is roughly datacenter lag (or was a few years back). 100ms is good cross-country pings, 300-600 is continent-to-continent links.

Figure on edge caching aas well.

Having lived in a "remote" (read not actually remote but not served by any ISP) area nearly anything would have been better than dial-up.

Way back in the day (10-15 years ago) my friend with satellite Internet had 300+ ms pings everywhere and at the time a dial-up modem was still required. Good to know things have changed.

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