Comment Re:Cable vs Satellite (Score 1) 63
It depends where you are, here in New Zealand satellite-to-satellite could offer significantly better latency to the USA than our ~150ms ping to California. A couple of hundred kilometers to orbit is nothing compared to the ~12,000 km distance. The direct light-speed travel time is ~40ms, which gives 80ms for a best case ping; in practice I'd expect to lose a fair bit of ping to routing etc., but it seems totally reasonable to me that the satellite-to-satellite ping will be more like ~100ms, which is a pretty massive improvement.
A lot of infrastructure is hosted in the US, so for New Zealand a 33% better ping to the US would actually make a fairly significant difference. Ping to Europe would obviously be improved even more, but I find it's pretty rare that I'm using a service that only has servers in the EU.
Your comments about bandwidth issues are accurate; it wouldn't really matter to me as an individual user though as long as the satellite provider wasn't over-subscribing the network.
A lot of infrastructure is hosted in the US, so for New Zealand a 33% better ping to the US would actually make a fairly significant difference. Ping to Europe would obviously be improved even more, but I find it's pretty rare that I'm using a service that only has servers in the EU.
Your comments about bandwidth issues are accurate; it wouldn't really matter to me as an individual user though as long as the satellite provider wasn't over-subscribing the network.