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Yes, the useful unit is light-milliseconds: $ units
You have: 340 mi
You want: light ms
* 1.8251859
/ 0.5478894
So, 3.6 ms round-trip. In practice, the route will be slanted, so could just exceed 5 ms. $ sudo apt install units
Once the constellation is mature, certain very-high-paying subscribers will get the packets forwarded from one satellite to the next via laser links, across oceans, before being downlinked, and get there a few ms before packets dawdling along on fiber links below 0.7c, to trigger securities trades ahead of the crowd acting on now-ancient information. The time by fiber from Singapore to New York is on the order of 90 ms, where Starlink ought to get them there in well under 70 ms, leaving a good 20 ms to arbitrage. In investment banking, they say "a microsecond is an eon, a millisecond is an eternity".Even just between New York and London, they can gain a few ms headway, enough to dominate. It would not be surprising if the US military, and maybe some others, will have access to satellite-to-satellite routing. (They have their own WGS, "Wideband Global SATCOM", but it is GEO, thus high-latency.) AFAIK, only the polar-orbit nodes have inter-satellite laser links, thus far, so this is a phenomenon of the near future, not the present. Other things to expect in the near future are lofting them with a few TB of storage, to minimize uplink bandwidth by edge-serving Disney and Netflix blockbusters; and multicast downlinks for real-time soccer games and maybe even time-binned shows. |
The SpaceX edge here is making this kind of thing cheaper and scalable to the point that a global community of hundreds of millions of users can multiplex signals on it, but for a sufficiently well-funded organization with fewer users, it was already possible.