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The bigger concern is the latency. Even if some technical progress increases the bandwidth, latency is bounded by speed of light and couldn't be as low as cable.


The low-earth orbit generally means that this is not as big of an issue as in older satellite technologies. Currently if you are in an area where the satellite does not need to bounce your data through one or more other satellites before hitting a ground station they are in the tens of milliseconds of latency (20-60).

Comcast is generally in the 20-30 neighborhood, unless you are using their gigabit service, then it is more like 10-15 milliseconds.

So it is higher, but not debilitatingly so (unless your application is very sensitive to latency). I would imagine there is a lot more jitter in Starlink, but that is more a feel than real numbers.

Mainly on a terrestrial system you wind up bouncing through more substations on the way to the general Internet, whereas with Starlink you are generally bouncing straight from your dish to the satellite to the base station. So less bounces, but farther to go. The physics favors the wire, but not as much as it used to.




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