It's probably already at a point where from a cost vs. benefit perspective I don't know if we should be laying a lot more cable, but I wonder if it will ever make the existing cables obsolete.
i doubt it, the speed of light is only so fast. Latency up to LEO, down to earth, back to LEO, down to you will always be more than to your local telco CO and back.
I don't imagine it will ever be 'better'. Like wifi though, at some point it will probably be good enough that for 90+% of use cases the tradeoff of cables isn't worth it.
Like I know ethernet is better, but very rarely does that little bit better latency or connection stability practically matter.
The use cases where it starts to be a problem is usually when humans are interacting with each other or humans/machines with financial markets. Maybe other things I'm not thinking of.
I don't think servers in orbit can solve this problem?
Light travels faster in a vacuum (laser in space) than it does through glass (fibre optic cable), when the gains from that exceed the trip up and down to the satellites you're coming out ahead in terms of latency. It may also be a more direct path than following undersea cables, but I haven't checked.
For bandwidth and regular internet connectivity, you can't really beat fibre. It's just so compact and speedy enough.
Fiber doesn’t care about cloudy days, typical storms, etc.
Starlink is of course superior when there’s a massive natural disaster, or major power loss to your region. Or if you’re in a rural area with zero other good options.
I guess that challenges my perspective. The ping point still stands. May or not be noticeable depending on how you use the internet.
Sure New York to Ohio is always going to be fastest over fibre, but what about New Zealand to London? Not sure how much that matters though and the speed of light is a pretty hard limit to what's possible.
However, for nation states there is a lot of value in having redundancy and sovereignty over your telecommunications infrastructure. Having a foreign country's company being sole provider could put you in a tough position (for the good/bad of your population).