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Comment by fragmede | Hacker News Reader

Given that Ukraine is nowhere near the US, even for satellites, that's hardly likely, given that their v1 satellites don't have inter-satellite links.

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Even with the link it makes no sense to route Ukrainian traffic all the way back to the US. All they'll do is route to the nearest downlink. Otherwise the intra-sat connections will become a bottleneck, not to mention the added latency.

If the ground station is near the server, then latency would actually be lower with Starlink. One use case of Starlink is HFT on the NYSE from London, a use case that terrestrial networks are too latent for. This is because the speed of light in a vacuum is 50% faster than the speed of light through fiber, and the distance traveled is just as often shorter as it is longer - depending on satellite position.

But you're not accounting for the latency added by the many satellite hops needed to get there :)

Every sat will need to do queueing and signal processing.

That's no different that a terrestrial network, in fact it's likely quicker as for better or for worse they're likely not using HTTP between the birds but rather a more efficient protocol.

Here I've got 18 hops from my office to HN:

    $ mtr news.ycombinator.com -rc 3
    Start: 2022-12-04T09:27:13+0200
    HOST: dotan-OptiPlex-7040         Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
      1.|-- _gateway                   0.0%     3    1.4   1.9   1.4   2.8   0.8
      2.|-- 172.19.19.254              0.0%     3    0.3   0.4   0.3   0.6   0.2
      3.|-- 62.128.42.108              0.0%     3    0.8   0.9   0.8   1.0   0.1
      4.|-- 31.154.12.149              0.0%     3    5.4   7.5   5.4  11.7   3.6
      5.|-- ???                       100.0     3    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
      6.|-- ???                       100.0     3    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
      7.|-- ???                       100.0     3    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
      8.|-- ???                       100.0     3    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
      9.|-- 82.102.131.249             0.0%     3    5.8   5.9   5.8   6.0   0.1
     10.|-- 82.102.131.251             0.0%     3   12.4  12.0  11.2  12.5   0.7
     11.|-- 82.102.131.201             0.0%     3   31.0  71.5  31.0 135.5  56.0
     12.|-- ???                       100.0     3    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
     13.|-- ???                       100.0     3    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
     14.|-- 82.102.129.226             0.0%     3   48.9  49.8  48.9  51.1   1.1
     15.|-- et-1-0-23-101.edge1.marse  0.0%     3   79.5  80.0  76.9  83.6   3.4
     16.|-- ae0.11.bar1.sandiego1.lev  0.0%     3  220.4 214.7 210.2 220.4   5.2
     17.|-- m5-hosting.bar1.sandiego1 33.3%     3  798.8 765.5 732.1 798.8  47.2
     18.|-- news.ycombinator.com       0.0%     3  233.2 228.1 220.9 233.2   6.4

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