> Boston to New York is 215mi or a 430 mile round trip.
Assuming terrestrial lines travel as the crow flies, which is not all that likely (but probably not too far off).
> At 200 miles up where they intend to put the satellites orbiting over major cities, it's going to be about 1000 mile round trip.
Other people here are noting that fiber signals travel at ~70% the speed of light, while radio waves travel at very close to the speed of light. If that's true, it puts the optimal time for land based optical communication at ~3.3ms[1] ms, while the optimal time for a low orbit satellite at ~5.4ms[2] (if I didn't screw up the math). That's slower, but not by a whole lot, so it might even be better than you're predicting.
Also, are people actually getting sub 4ms round trip times between Boston and New York? If not, then the difference here might be entirely subsumed by other factors.
Assuming terrestrial lines travel as the crow flies, which is not all that likely (but probably not too far off).
> At 200 miles up where they intend to put the satellites orbiting over major cities, it's going to be about 1000 mile round trip.
Other people here are noting that fiber signals travel at ~70% the speed of light, while radio waves travel at very close to the speed of light. If that's true, it puts the optimal time for land based optical communication at ~3.3ms[1] ms, while the optimal time for a low orbit satellite at ~5.4ms[2] (if I didn't screw up the math). That's slower, but not by a whole lot, so it might even be better than you're predicting.
Also, are people actually getting sub 4ms round trip times between Boston and New York? If not, then the difference here might be entirely subsumed by other factors.
1: 430 Miles / 186,000 M/s / 0.70 = 0.0033 s
2: 1000 Miles / 186,000 Miles/s = 0.0054 s