Comment by 7e
1 year ago
Starlink adds a latency penalty of tens of milliseconds going through the atmosphere. Each round trip is four hops through the clouds. I expect most of this delay is forward error correction, combined with lower bandwidth of the radios.
On top of that, you may have queuing in each satellite.
Finally, the satellite laser links aren’t pointing exactly in the direction you want to your packets to travel. They’re at some diagonal, and the packets need to tack back and forth, which wastes distance. Think the streets of Manhattan.
This is just incorrect. The speed of light through atmosphere is almost identical to speed of light in a vacuum. There's no latency penalty for traveling through the atmosphere. The one-way time delay to a Starlink satellite is about 2 milliseconds.