I was under the impression that Starlink latency is actually very competitive with terrestrial fiber. Why do you say it wasn't or isn't? Everything I find suggest Starlink will have low latency.
For most usages yes. For gaming though it's right on the edge: theoretical minimum at 350km orbit is 40ms roundtrip, which would work for most games. But many complications, including position of the satellite, latencies within the networking components, packet loss etc, can easily slow this to 100ms+, which is unsuitable for many online games.
No, the round trip for electromagnetic waves at 350km it’s about 2 ms not 40.
The lowest orbit of the satellites though would be 550km and not 350km, but it would still be less than 4ms.
From where did you get the 40ms figure that it’s wrong by an order of magnitude?
I don't know where they got that figure from, but it is unrealistic to not also expect a decent amount of latency to be introduced by the transmission hardware, particularly under load. I have no idea how much, but this has generally been the case with most systems of this sort.
Electromagnetic waves travel at essentially the speed of light. The speed of light is roughly 300km per millisecond. So if they are 550km up, that’s roughly 4ms round trip. Even with horrible inefficiency, it won’t likely increase that by 10x.
