Markets don't, but, GP said:

"I can't imagine much appetite for any future under-sea cabling out of Australia"

And the reality is that satellites can not compete with the bandwidth of subsea cables for bulk data transfer, HFT is a whole other world.

I’d guess that high speed data transfer competes with overnight shipping a hard drive in most current cases. In my day to day life, for most cases I’d rather has 10 Mbps with 10 ms latency than 1 Gbps with 250 ms latency. Generally speaking I’m looking for a snappy user experience and fast enough for Netflix streaming to a non-premium television. But high bandwidth and low latency would be super nice!

A lot of serious HFT has moved to HF radio bands with giant aimed yagi uda or dipole antennas, already... London, new york, chicago, tokyo. It's very low bit rate but lower latency.

So Australian FinTech will definitely appreciate Starlink, then?

I suspect Australian FinTech would be more interested in colocating near exchanges instead of trying to beam their orders through space, but I don't work in the sector so I can't say for sure.

Totally different use cases.

If you want to observe events at one exchange and send orders to another, all that matters is total latency. For that use it doesn't matter whether your servers are in the same room as one of the exchanges or 200 miles away from either one.

It's true that total latency is what matters, and minimising latency by sitting near one of them and taking advantage of low-latency connections between exchanges sounds reasonable.

Does this have a name? Something like "a race to ridiculousness?" It's so bizarre that it matters that someone places an order a few ms before someone else. And it's probably ns now. No time to stop and think,... just be faster than someone else.

Capitalism? :P

Many wired leased lines that connect data vendors to exchanges are only ~2Mbps even in 2021.

You tend to get bandwidth spikes on most feeds at market open and close, but intraday rates are low