Starlink: 20-50ms Viasat: 600-1000ms

Starlink at 20-50 ms ? I would never have imagined a roundtrip to orbit that fast... My last experience with satellites were before generalized intercontinental fiber and those jumps were above one second !

That's partially the difference between geostationary orbit (35,786km away) and low Earth orbit (1,100km away). Just that extra distance means that the radio waves take an extra 230ms to get to the Vialink satellite and back. The time of flight to a Starlink satellite and back is very small in comparison.

Starlink satellites are in LEO, they're much closer than viasat/hughesnet.

Some recent starlink latency numbers (and a methodology to measure starlink latency without needing any specialized hardware)

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07469

I've seen LTE latencies (not 5G) as low as 15 ms for 5+ years. Not saying it's typically that good, but that it can be significantly better than what you're saying.

I don’t think it maintains this under load from your device.

Yeah - this is a big factor.

My home internet gets ~7ms to London (I'm in the UK, London is the important IXP. My test is to one of my ISP's routers at LINX). 5G is about 40ms.

When you add load, my home internet stays at about 7/8ms (CAKE is wonderful!), but my 5G goes to 200-600ms.

No doubt about that. Also my fiber optic connection latency increases a bit under load.

latency under load is next up for public awareness, hold on tight

I just tested on my phone (4G LTE) and it sees a ~28-35ms latency to 1.1.1.1. For reference, by cable internet gets ~12ms.

I could see where close proximity + 1900-2100mhz could get you that low.

For GSMA, I'm ~7k feet to the tower on band 66.

> I'm ~7k feet to the tower

that's about 2,1 km

VDSL2+ here, about 10ms