Latency of Starlink v2 could be as low as 8ms

edited to make quote more accurate

Yeah I'm struggling to get too excited here. Theoretically latency with current geostationary satellites "could be as low as" 477ms, but they're usually 600ms+.

Plus this is for v2, which Elon has said will be launching on Starship ... so some years away.

Perfectly straight upward, to the lowest-flying tier of satellites, just pinging the satellite itself ... maybe?

If they are able to keep the orbit at 550km and get the latency down to 3.66 ms, they will have changed physics forever.

I hope Elon has a special pricing tier and high bandwidth limits for primarily solar-powered devices that spend most of their duty cycle airborne --that truly would be transformative as existing cell towers are typically only available near highways and commerce centers.

This is a very roundabout PR blitz. Just show a speedtest!

End to end latency to things on the internet of 100ms isn't a deal breaker. There are a number of things out there on the internet that are far more than 100ms away from me, because they're on the other side of the atlantic or pacific oceans. Exactly what distance and topology this 100ms is being measured over needs to be specified.

There are already a number of residential and small business last mile access technologies that introduce 20-25ms latency. It can be 20-25ms latency from an ADSL2+ modem to the DSLAM. Or on a moderately loaded DOCSIS3 network latency from modem to CMTS can also be 20-25ms.

Starlink is expected to be 20-25ms for RTT latency from the CPE to the earth station. From the earth station (those of which I know about are colocated with long haul fiber sites), latency to destinations on the internet would be the same as terrestrial internet customers in the same location.

It's important to define two different things:

a) space segment latency, which will be 20-25ms

b) terrestrial latency, which will be exactly the same as any other properly-peered and interconnected large domestic ISP (such as a Wave, Charter, Comcast, Centurylink, etc).

The satellites will be serving as bent pipe relays.

Indeed. This smells like a company I worked for about 20 years ago. The engineering team had an idea and were checking feasibility. The sales team overheard a meeting about it and proceeded to prepare a marketing pack for it which leaked out into the IT press. Analyst said it was rubbish (they were correct). About a month later the engineers had given up. Another month after that they were told their product had the first customer and nearly fell of their chairs.

Incidentally they did deliver after slowly lowering expectations over the period of 6 months.

Why would you believe the FCC over Elon Musk?

Then.... they have not even commented specifically on Starlink.

Then.... it was just one page in 141, hardly a report or anything of note.

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/FCC-20-77A1.pdf (Page 42)

Elon Musk has put billions into this, and it's not going to really work if it's above 100.

Clearly the 8ms is a optimistic hope, no one expects it to be that for all people all the time. But it'll be below 100ms.