I didn't say the latency was as high as GEO. If a car commercial said a car was $20k, and you got to the dealership and it was $60k, would you just throw your hands up and say it's still pretty good? The point is that the publicity was based on completely fake promises.
When you live in mountainous areas you usually have three options.
Dial-up - if its offered still in your area,
Point to point internet - if you have neighbours in line of sight also participating.
or Satellite - if you are in line of sight to the satellite
Many people I know up-country usually all they get is satellite, so yeah starlink may not the promised 20ms, but its hella lot better than what traditional satellite is providing (also hopeful starlink provides better reliability and tech support which in satellite is quite atrocious as well)
Heh - as far as what's promised vs delivery, read the fine print on satellite internet plans, they have wording saying the hope is to provide the advertised speeds but there is no guarantee that they ever will.
Everything you just said applies to starlink as well. Why the double standard? Still need line of sight, they still won't provide advertised speed guarantees ( no ISP does).
And most people don't care about latency. Bandwidth is far more important.
For real time games, yes, for the vast majority of traffic, no. Streaming and web browsing are plenty interactive enough for this to matter. Even VoIP does perfectly fine if it's tuned properly.
Browsing on 500ms is terrible and 500ms delay on voice ruins conversations. Most streaming apps don’t even have deep enough buffers to deal with the terrible latencies of satellite.
A single web page load of a “modern” website requires 10s of TCP connections to load resources from CDNs, each of which requires TLS handshakes taking 1.5 seconds, which are not initiated until the initial page is downloaded enough to see resources to load.
I had to live on this Internet for a summer. It was awful and was only good for long downloads. Everything else was literally better on dial-up. And this was 15 years ago.
