[matthewdgreen]

The routing paths traveling via ground stations, you mean? My understanding is that they were experimenting with improvements to this, they just haven't deployed anything yet.

[sandworm101]

A radio will beat starlink on ping times. Even a simple ham bouncing a off the ionosphere can win out over an orbiting satellite, at least for the very small amounts of data needed for a trade order. The difficulty in such schemes is reliability, which can be hit-or-miss depending on a hundred factors.

[pclmulqdq]

No, even with proposed inter-satellite routing paths, they are too slow. The trading industry has very much done the math on this.

The comparison is against radio and hollow-core fiber, not conventional fiber.

[fragmede]

Laser links between satellites have been active since late 2022, or was there some additional improvement you're referring to?

[pclmulqdq]

I haven't kept track of that, but there is no other improvement. Even with the straightest possible laser links in space, they are too slow.