Speed of light in fibre is 40% slower than in a vacuum. SpaceX is planning on funding expansion by selling lower latency connections to London-NYSE traders.

Sure; that's a premium product using some of the _extremely_ limited bandwidth offered by such a solution, tho. Hard to see how it competes with the ~infinite bandwidth offered by fibre for normal usage, tho.

I'm not sure the bandwidth will be as limited as you think. If the premium product catches on, further investments will be made to improve the premium product, and those benefits will eventually trickle down to the average user.

> Hard to see how it competes with the ~infinite bandwidth offered by fibre for normal usage, tho

1.) Wouldn't be surprised to see ISP's cap bandwidth per individual user and create additional "bandwidth" and "data usage" pricing tiers. Thanks to net neutrality being wiped out, it's now permissible to charge via "fast lanes" and "slow lanes" what makes you think this behavior will stop on the commercial side of things?

2.) You will have secure internet access basically everywhere you go, rather than jumping around different untrustworthy wifi networks. Also, won't need to deal with annoyances of being just outside your wifi network. (e.g. when you're doing yard-work or something)

3.) I could see StarLink encrypting data transmissions out of the box, so you wouldn't need to worry about getting a VPN, or ISP's selling your browsing history, etc

> If the premium product catches on, further investments will be made to improve the premium product, and those benefits will eventually trickle down to the average user.

The low-latency customers would generally not actually care very much about bandwidth, tho. And it's in practice hard to increase bandwidth beyond a certain point with something like this. The LEO satellite essentially acts like a large cell tower; everyone in its range has to share a limited amount of physical bandwidth. Actually, worse; the cell tower generally has dedicated backhaul, whereas backhaul for the LEO satellites is shared to some degree. Whereas fibre is point-to-point (modulo some loop-based last-mile systems, but those tend to have lots of capacity).

1) Net neutrality being wiped out _in one country_. Perhaps temporarily. I really don't buy a future scenario where the US has a bunch of LEO satellites, and the rest of the developed world has fibre everywhere. And if StarLink et al were actually competitive, conventional ISPs would just cut prices and improve service (which they can in many cases do almost for free due to overprovisioning; my ISP has increased my bandwidth from 120Mbit/sec to 500 over the past four years by essentially adjusting some config in their DOCSIS system), such that it was no longer competitive.

2) LTE is a thing (and don't these LEO satellite internet things require fixed antennae?)

3) I would certainly _hope_ they'd encrypt data transmission out of the box! All wireless and shared wire (eg DOCSIS) systems have done so for decades. And you'd still absolutely have to worry about your ISP (StarLink, or similar LEO sat company) selling your browsing history.

LEO satellite broadband may have a place, but its place will largely be in places where there is no fibre infrastructure, and where there's no LTE/5G tower in range. In the developed world, that's getting to be a rare condition. Plus the weird ultra-low-latency edge case (which I would maintain is largely not relevant to consumers, and will be beaten by edge computing in many cases anyway). Whether that will be enough to sustain it commercially remains to be seen.