competitive gamers make up a very small percentage of all internet users (or even gamers!). Like professional athletes, they will move or go to a special facility for this sort of latency requirement.
Many games are not as latency sensitive as you think - people used to play over modems!
If by "competitive" you mean anyone who plays any sort of real-time game such as RTS, FPS, or even real-time mobile game. Many consumers may take a while to figure out that latency is the reason they lose/die when it doesn't look like they should, but they will feel the effects immediately.
Granted users in rural areas are likely the most apt to benefit from this service and those users don't likely fantastic internet to begin with. However, if SpaceX markets this to areas with decent quality internet they're likely to get a bad reputation for "crappy" internet.
Yes, even those people make up a tiny fraction of the internet. Satellite internet typically will not work for those people, and there is no point in trying to sell to them.
That's the same percentage as Linux users, and just yesterday I closed my Box.com membership because the don't have a Linux client "due to low demand".
Ehhh, not sure about this. If you're a parent and your kid is begging you to get faster internet, you might listen to them a little bit. If their marketing can get those kids to do that, then that might be a successful campaign.
I agree in principle that kids can influence parental purchasing, and that marketing is geared to take advantage of that. But the effect appears to be most effective for items that are exciting and tangible objects in front of the child; think checkout aisle candy, not “boring” adult things like finance and bills.
Here’s an interesting parallel; how much say does any child have in the cell phone plan that a family uses? Probably damn close to 0. That’s a decision that the parents make on their own, and dictate the rules of usage to their children. I suspect that internet service will remain that way as well.
For candy and toys, sure. But there are a wide range of goods and services where the child has 0 say. Cars, homes, and even cell phone companies never market to kids in order to influence the parents, implying that children have no meaningful impact in these areas.
Now these services advertise to adults with children, such as being able to call your kids whenever with the unlimited cell phone plan, but that’s still advertising to the adult, not the child.
I play League of Legends and have only DSL but my ping is only 35 ms and I can't complain -- many other players have it worse than me.
What did make it impossible for me to get kills was having 30 ms of latency in my display system. I think the network latency is well-compensated (if the typical user has 50 ms of latency, just delay me by 20 ms) but the display latency kills me. When I switched to a different monitor I started playing much better in about five games.
I think the game generates a 10 MB log for a 30 minute session so the bandwidth requirement is not much.
I had the same experience playing Titanfall earlier; in that case turning on the "Game Mode" on the TV turned me from someone who couldn't win at all to somebody who could get halfway up the ladder.
Display (and input!) latency are real things, and matter quite a bit. There have been studies in the past where people measured the full button press to frame update time using high speed cameras, and not all games are equal. As for game mode on TV's, that specifically why it exists. As a passive medium a little latency doesn't matter, but when a system is responding to input, latency is noticeable.
If you're interested in how different TV's perform, segregated by their individual input ports (in cases where some ports are optimized) and modes, check out https://www.rtings.com/. I used it a couple years ago to pick out a good 4k TV as a monitor, and the very thorough information helped me pick out something that works well as a computer monitor (and also for the occasional gaming).
How does 30ms of display latency affect LoL gameplay? I don't play it, but I've seen videos of it a few times and with it not being a FPS I wonder what aspects of the game are that greatly affected with an additional 30ms of display latency.
Mind you, any mouse lag drives me up the wall. I've never measured at what point I perceive that mouse lag, but it's a fairly low number I'm sure.
I guess it depends on the game being played. When I played C&C in the 90s over modem, the latency was huge but it wasn't a major concern for that type of game.
Now that I play real time sports, and I'm no professional, it still makes a big difference in my enjoyment of the game when I'm playing at home with ethernet and top tier internet service vs playing at my parent's house on wifi and basic internet. The lag can really affect my ability to play my best and it sucks losing because you don't have a low latency connection.
That said, I'm very curious to see what the latency will be, because if it's within a reasonable range it could be acceptable. Either way, I don't think even casual gamers will have a significant impact on their sales, but it will have some if the lag is too great for some of today's games.
Try having an RDP session to fix Windows servers based in Australia with 400+ ms latency (Europe is unfortunately nowhere near Australia) on your GUI, the ordeal will leave a permanent scar on your psyche.
The speed of light is insignificant for such a short distance. Even if the signal travels as much as the circumference (40000km) of the earth at 70% lightspeed it shouldn't take more than 180ms. The lowest possible latency between Australia and Europe would be 60ms. Congested networks and network routers with suboptimal routes introduce far more latency than the distance. I regularly get between 100ms - 200ms latency between California and Germany and the latter number includes the realtime encoding/decoding of the video stream.
Internet gamers are fine with double-digit millisecond latencies, and this is what Starlink will offer. It takes less than 4ms to reach 1000km LEO orbit, so 16ms for the full round-trip (you -> sat, sat -> server, server -> sat, sat -> you). Make it 2ms ground-to-satellite and 8ms round-trip if you believe the model from this thread[0] (satellites at ~600km). Using its numbers, add 2x 2ms for each inter-satellite link you have to travel back and forth.
It still adds up to sub-100ms latencies. It ain't bad.
With the right type of architecture, low-earth satellite could offer better latency than terrestrial.
terrestrial internet goes through optic fiber in which the speed of light is maybe half the speed of light in a vacuum. Already HFTs use microwave links to shave off a few milliseconds between New York and Chicago. From Boston to Seattle the extra 600 miles up and down from the constellation would be overcome by the fast path along that route.
Note that requires switching from one satellite to the next, not the "bent pipe" architecture to your local rent seeking wireless company that StarLink and other LEO constellations plan.
I’ve read the paper that started this idea of Starlink being a low latency alternative for hft (http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf) There are a couple of problems with the paper. The first is that they establish a range of acceptable latency as existing between the great circle route and the fastest ping time on the internet between two points. For example they found that NY to London was 75ms round trip on the internet. However the long time standard bearer for a pure fiber path had been 64ms until the latest gen cables arrived in 2016. At that point the latency was sub 60 ... very comparable to the 55ms great circle route. But it’s important to understand that the starlink point to point route will be constantly changing — so only in one or two instances will that latency even come close to the existing terrestrial routes. More often than not the latency would trend closer to the 70ms range - well beyond anything considered competitive either in the current generation of routes much less the prior generation. It’s as if the authors simply had no idea about the hft market and what latencies might be needed (all of which has been published publicly). But there’s another problem with the study. For the solution to work, spacex would need to dedicate one of its laser links to enable communications across other satellites and dedicate that capacity to this application. And further, the study did not address the issue of optronic delays within the satellites. Most microwave manufacturers care little about hft latency tolerances and intermachine delays can be 1-2ms per hop. Assuming starlink to not to be much different (although I don’t know this to be true or not) that would definitely add even more latency to the equation. So all in all while it’s interesting and will do amazing things for consumers and enterprises, I don’t see starlink being a competitive hft solution unless the route in questions is really long and a lot of other engineering stuff can be made to work to enable it. Call me a skeptic but I don’t think we will see it.
I’m just pointing out that the slice of consumers who are a) internet gamers b) concerned about Starlink latency and c) still think Starlink is old school geosynchronous satellite. Gamers will of course worry about latency just like they optimize every other aspect of their setup, but not to the effect that SpaceX needs to mount a marketing campaign to that effect.
Yeah, and they'll care enough to actually find out what the latency is rather than reflexively shooting things down. And don't forget word of mouth. All it takes is one prominent streamer that you follow, or anyone in your friend group, saying good things about it -- and now it's on the table for you.
I think this would only be true if internet gamers weren't a thing, but they are, and they'll care.