"Starlink's median latency, 45 milliseconds (ms) is close to fixed broadband's 14 ms. " How is 3 times as much 'close'?
They're saying it's close compared to starlink's competitors which aren't even the same order of magnitude. In context I think it's a fair assessment.
You are forgetting round-trip request latency, handshakes, and dependent resources (don't know what to fetch until receiving the first thing, then the second level of things, etc., this can stack to multiple seconds).
High latency is very bad for browsing. The main things it is fine for are streaming audio/video (non-interactive), large downloads, and backing up/uploading files.
And the handshake time doesn’t compound; there is no need to open a new connection to the server for every resource needed by a webpage. The web browser just keeps reusing the same connection until it runs out of resources to fetch from the server.
Third party analytics and other resources often means it compounds even for handshaking, but dependent resources can compound too even on the same server even if they don't each need a handshake.
45ms reminds me more of 3G than of any normal internet connection, but that's still much more useful than the latencies the sattelite competition offers.
40ms is me essentially connecting halfway across the country. A Digital Ocean droplet in SF or NY is ~40ms.
11-12ms to a Google CDN from your colo? That's insane to me. Pinging from my colo to Google using the ping utility from iputils for 50 packets gives an average ping of 1.6ms. Akamai pings at 2.1ms.
I'm not sure what the difference is between the two.
I've seen fast-mode DSL around 7ms, interleaved DSL around 20 ms, cable usually 5-10 ms, but highly variable. ATT GPON was 5 ms which I thought was pretty high, although fiber should really be sub 1 ms.
I've seen LTE between 10 and 60 ms (or worse, when it's congested), older technologies are usually quite a bit more.
PING 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=1 ttl=115 time=12.7 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=2 ttl=115 time=11.4 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=3 ttl=115 time=10.6 ms 64 bytes from 8.8.8.8: icmp_seq=4 ttl=115 time=10.9 ms
I get about the same from my home cable internet connection.
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