Oh, ok. But 22km is still a lot more than a typical 4G/5G urban cell. It's basically the size of a city. Whereas I can spot multiple stations in my city if I go for a 5-10 minute walk.
If by "last decade" you're comparing against geostationary, then yes. The satellites are roughly a hundred times closer.
Yes. Starlink satelites are at low earth orbit, much much closer than the geosyncronous orbits communication satelites a decade ago had to be at.
Distance is latency because the radio waves can “only” propagate at the speed of light. The shorter the trip the faster the signals can make it.
Also, that 22km beam isn't going to be uniform, but rather higher gain at the center, and below some power threshold at the peripheral.
I wonder if this is why SETI hasn't found any alien communications: they invented spread-spectrum communications and it all looks like noise to us.
It is why few take it seriously. Why would anybody be putting that much effort into trying to get our attention?
Since each tech spreads from the source in a small sphere-shaped shell depending on when that technology was invented, you need a huge co-incidence for someone else's shell to hit you WHEN you are listening for that type of communication.