Comment by minhazm
1 year ago
Number of hops definitely matters more usually. For example I'm about 150 miles from Azure East US 2 (richmond, va), and at the speed of light that should be sub 2ms round trip, but actual latency to it is ~30ms. But I'm sure I'm going through dozens of switches/routers to get there. What Starlink buys you is that you get to go straight to a satellite, then a laser in a vacuum to other satellite(s) and then a ground station that's likely already at an IXP or very close to one.
Could also be shit routing.
Some big ISPs here refused to locally peer with some cheaper providers, so some packets to a local data centre (5 miles away) in Toronto would round trip through Chicago and back.
If they wanted a direct connection; they wanted them to pay for transit.