[diroussel]

It should be lower latency for transaltantic and other long haul traffic, as the speed of light in glass is roughly half that of the vacuum of space. So the extra distance to space is offset by the faster speed of light.

[kaliszad]

That is very roughly... it is about 2/3 c and can be calculated by the refractive index of quartz glass vs air (e.g. SiO2 has refractive index between 1.55 bad and 1.4 good for the speed) e.g. 1/1.55 ~ 0.645 and 1/1.4 ~ 0.714. According to "Main Parameters" section of [0] it seems to be 1/1.44 for the silica used in actual fibers.

A good approximation would be 200 km/ 1 ms instead of 300 km/ 1 ms for speed of light in a vacuum/ microwave links.

[0] https://www.rp-photonics.com/fibers.html

[someperson]

They don't have the laser interconnects working yet, so long haul traffic won't go over Starlink for some time.

[Tepix]

Simulations have shown that it can still be faster than fiber even without laser interconnects.

[shaklee3]

That simulation only takes into account the satellite delay. Fiber delay will be another 20-30ms.