Well, and ViaSat is actually available now.

"Available in 2023". We'll see. I mean FSD has been "coming this year" since 2016. And I regularly see people here complaining that they're still waitlisted for their terrestrial Starlink service.

Who knows what ViaSat will have by whenever Starlink actually makes this happen (you know, with the mobile RV service that's "coming soon", and the maritime service, also "coming soon", and now this...).

viasat will have viasat-3 by then, which is about 5x their total current capacity.

Yeah, but latency will be suboptimal as viasat's satellites are in geosynchronous orbit. Many laws a optional, but I'm afraid they can't get around the speed of light...

this is a common thing SpaceX people say, but in reality, it doesn't matter that much. streaming media isn't affected by latency at all, and web browsing/app usage is good enough. what really suffers is real time games or VPN, but that's not as common.

250ms minimum latency (just for the speed of light), once you add switching that's going to be over 400ms. You have to be pretty apologetic to accept this.

I live in Australia (118ms round trip), and whenever I'm in SF, I'm amazed at the quality of life increase brought about by decreased latency. It feels like the whole net is on localhost.

so geosynchronous switching adds 150ms, but starlink is only adding 100ms?

Folks are reporting 40ms on Starlink and 638ms for Viasat.

I don’t know what is going on, and I don’t use either service.

Viasat latency is also typical for geostationary service, which is to say bad to the point of being limiting. For things like videoconferencing, Starlink will be much more viable, even at the same bandwidth.

I regularly videoconference with team members who are on geostationary Viasat..., it's just not an issue. They say they had to learn how to adapt a little bit by giving people time to finish their thoughts, that's about it.

Starlink promises 350 Mb/s, not MB/s, although given their current promises vs actual speeds, I think customers may adjust their expectations a bit.

Not sure where you pulled 30 Mb/s for Viasat service but it regularly tests more than 2x as fast as that (on the current-gen satellites, the newest of which is 5 years-old by now. Viasat-3 Americas has actually over 5x the capacity of Viasat-2 along with a big bag of other goodies that will enable a class of service heretofore unseen.)