You know I'm starting to suspect that maybe corporations don't have our best interests in mind....

The tech behind starlink is good. LEO satellites play a purpose. Upsides are they have less latency than GEO satellites. Speeds are the same though.

Downside is you have to deploy them evenly as a constellation or else you get service inturruption. Which means if you look at any population map 90% of your constellation is going to be underutilized, and the other 10% is going to be full.

The real target audience should be mobile broadband. Airplanes, ships, RVs, cars, phones, etc.

But what do you do in the meantime? Fill in the unutilized constillation with rural residential. You can't compete with fiber tech, so you sue the govt for free money.

Don’t forget Nazi

A bunch starlink modems in an area can overload or whatever the nearby satellite. This is not feasible in its current form.

Yeah, I can’t imagine a medium sized town all using Starlink at once without issues.

Weird, that sounds anti-competitive.

So if my ping is currently 90ms on fiber, it’ll become 900ms - 4.5s on starlink?

That’s basically perfect, with regards to online gaming.

A subscription that somehow still manages to use surge pricing? I’m assuming that’s the next logical step.

Companies like Viasat with GEO sattelites have the advantage of one mololithic sattelite with massive coverage. They have a ton of little antennas on each sattelite that they can adjust as demand changes. Need more coverage in an area due to demand? They can task an antenna not doing anything over there.

Latency is a B though. Minimum 500ms each way. Which is minimum 1sec round trip just physics not actual. What's interesting is the layperson (non online gamer) doesn't notice much. It's not abnormal for a rando website to take a few seconds to load on my wifi. Or for a netflix stream to take a few seconds before it starts buffering. The biggest problem a company like viasat has is old tech in the sky. They can't handle the load of everyone watching netflix. So, they have to data cap everyone. It'll be interesting to see if their new sattelites later this year fix that or if they keep the caps on.

Probably no. Your ping is abnormally high for fiber, I’d expect a sub 10ms ping for you.

Not only do you have to deploy them in a constellation, you have to deploy them in a descending constellation. They are constantly burning up all the time and you have to keep launching new ones forever just to maintain current capacity. It’s the perfect business plan to make SpaceX look better on paper.

Here's a better idea: nationalize SpaceX and tell Musk to go fuck himself first. Not going to happen? Then no grant money.

That makes a lot of assumptions about what I am pinging, and the networking context.

In my case I was quoting my average ping in VRChat.

How can you quote 10-50 times higher and then tell me no when I calculate what that means for me?

Is it because latency does not scale in that way?

I got better ping playing Quake multiplayer in 1996

Heh yep, in fact they're not lasting as long as they were supposed to.

That used dedicated servers, right?

Of course. Still, an exception doesn’t disprove expected averages.

You're probably really far away from the VR Chat server. Try pinging Google or Cloudflare, which will tell you ping to the nearest datacenter (a rough estimate of ping caused by your local ISP).

Based on their numbers, you could probably expect 50-100ms to Google, and then add an extra 90ms to get from there to your VR Chat server.

My personal fiber connection gets under 2ms ping on Speedtest

So you were only talking about when testing with ideal servers? Why is my example an exception? Are all games an exception?