Is there any real world test data out for going over the laser interlinks yet? I know there have been Elon Musk tweets on the topic, but he tends to tweet from a spherical cow engineering world when looking at future specs. From very early on the "much lower latency due to the speed of light in a vacuum" posts have been repeated but there is a non negligible number of routing decisions and hops in the starlink mesh and the additional 1100-2200km entry/exit, as well as bandwidth and handover limitations.
London/New York doesn't seem like the distance that there is going to be huge wins for back bone connected entities. But I guess that even if you can land a percentage of packets quicker via starlink, then there is some value in the trading world?
Let's look at numbers. NYC->LDN great-circle distance is 5576 km. At altitude, that is (3959+547)/3959 * 5576 = 6346 km. Idealized path is thus 547 * 2 + 6346 = 7420 km. (Actually a bit less because the path is part of a polygon, not an arc.) Non-ideal path, for satellites not directly overhead, is more like 7900 km, worst case more. Still, transit time, light through vacuum, is <28 ms.
Compare to fiber. Best ping time is 76 ms, or 38 ms one way. So, our budget margin is 10 ms. Suppose, instead of a direct downlink, packets are dumped to a nearby hub and carried via 1000 km of fiber to the destination, with various routing delays, adding 5 ms, leaving a 5 ms lead, 5000 microseconds.
In finance, we say a microsecond is an eon, a millisecond an eternity. That is because in a microsecond we can do >1k multiplications. 5 ms is time for >5M multiplications, many more than needed to evaluate a position and choose a response.
The only routing choices are which satellite to uplink to, and whether to forward or downlink each packet. Whatever choices are made don't need to be re-evaluated more than per second. Packet queuing delay can be negligible; modern switching equipment will start forwarding a packet while the rest is still arriving; this would happen when forwarding via laser link.
The latency advantage for New York/London/Frankfurt <-> Singapore/Tokyo/Hong Kong would be even more compelling.
There are many things rich people can do, poor cannot. You gotta have money, to make (real) money.
Thats the harsh truth and most of us who do not have it, have to struggle hard, to make some wealth and very, very hard and be very lucky and gifted, to get rich by it (without negating all ethics).
Isn't some of the futility if that struggle due to the theft-by-design that central bank led inflation causes, along with their reliance on the government education systems continuing to fail to educate people on his money actually works?
London/New York doesn't seem like the distance that there is going to be huge wins for back bone connected entities. But I guess that even if you can land a percentage of packets quicker via starlink, then there is some value in the trading world?