[pjscott]

They're going for an orbital height of 600–800 km, or about 2-3 light-milliseconds from Earth's surface. A lot of people think of satellites as being necessarily high-latency because of intuition drawn from satellites in geosynchronous orbit – but those are about 50x farther away from earth and have correspondingly longer ping times.

[bakies]

They don't go directly to the satellite but through ground stations and then bounce around on lasers between satellites. The latency is going to be worse than fiber