Let’s see if we can bring the cost of hollow core fiber down, it would be faster transatlantic even

Often the bigger difference is just that fiber never goes in a straight line, even if it’s going to the right city. All that pesky geography gets in the way and makes the path longer.

As far as I can tell it almost exclusively follows the existing roads in Europe. Probably an easier way to secure rights in one go like rails used to be for telco lines.

Pipelines, Sewer systems, rail too.

Geography and property lines, twin banes of every infrastructure builder.

And because getting heavy plant up through a mountain range to dig trenches etc is a pain in the arse. It’s easier to do it along a main road.

If you were smart about it then you wouldn’t go up in the mountains in the first place. To get the lowest possible latency you want a straight shot, so obviously you should just bore your way through at the level of the plains on either side.

Unless you're trying to do something like high frequency stock trading, this does not really matter. Most of the added latency is added in the hops themselves, as packets are being classified and routed. Your generic Internet user won't be able to see any difference.

You need to take error into account, too. Can atmospheric conditions corrupt the transmission (this is not a rhetorical question, I actually don't know)? If so then your latency and bandwidth will both suffer.

EDIT: also, in the very likely case that the packet is not addressed to the satellite itself, routing comes into play. In the best-case scenario where the satellite is somehow able to transmit the packet directly to its destination the distance it travels is actually doubled. If the packet instead gets transmitted from the satellite to a base-station which then routes it through fiber-optics then there's no point in trying to argue that the satellite connection is the faster of the two even if that is true.