Amazing performance improvements, except no improvement at all on the packet roundtrip time to Netherlands. Someone should really work on that.
However, I suspect one big problem is that there are a number of hops between the Netherlands and San Francisco. I suspect there's not a fiber line that goes right through Idaho to Greenland, then, Scotland, and then the Netherlands. I'm curious what the actual route is be and how many miles are involved.
There’s tons of possible routes, but here is a probable one:
SFO -> NJ -> UK -> NL -> AMS = ~6,250mi one way minimum GC distance, probably closer to 7k-7,500mi in reality
The majority of transatlantic landings are along the Jersey shore, but could also be Long Island, NY, or Boston / Virginia Beach vicinity too.
Past that physics take over, and unfortunately the speed of light is pretty slow.
As no one has ever said: "I'll take glass over gas, thanks."
Back-of-the-envelope calculation: at an altitude of 550km and minimum elevation of 25 degrees above the horizon, a single Starlink hop could cover a maximum of 1880km of distance along the earth's surface, with a ground-satellite-ground length of 2068km.
So the total distance traveled through space is about 10% farther, but the signal goes 50% faster than through fiber, which is enough to cut your round-trip time from about 19ms to 14ms (plus any extra latency introduced by routers). That's nothing to sneeze at.
So in order for LEO satellites to compete, the total distance from A to B must be less than 1.5 times the equivalent of hollow core fiber on the ground.
Oh god I have to do trig! So finding the ratio of the the horizontal (ground) to vertical (altitude) when the hypotenuse is 1.5 * the horizontal =
(1.5**2-1)**0.5 = 1.118033988749895.
550 / 1.118033988749895 * 2 = 984km
Disclaimer: there are too many assumptions and approximations in here, it's just for fun.
[edit]
whoops, hollow core is supposed to be almost speed of light, so actually it's not much of a competition any more in the idealised case.
Assuming that the link is close to saturated, real life latency will be determined by how big the buffers are at each hop.
Traditionally, internet providers have been optimising for bandwidth at the cost of latency. I wonder what Starlink does.