I saw something interesting the other day that I had previously missed: Starlink has the potential to provide lower latency around the globe than terrestrial fiber because light travels faster in vacuum than in optical silica fiber. "Delay is Not an Option: Low Latency Routing in Space" https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10062262/ http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf "We conclude that a network built in…
I thought I read somewhere that they cancelled the plans to use lasers and were going to use radio instead. But now I can't find anything about it.
That is, the initial constellation (my guess, the first 800 satellites) goes up without intersat links and acts as a bent pipe only. Lasers are still very much a plan for the later parts on the constellation, and the laserless satellites will eventually be replaced with ones with the lasers once they age out, but the laser links were simply not ready yet and their spectrum license essentially forces them to put the birds up on as quick a schedule as they can.
The laserless sats will not use radio to communicate with each other, but rather will use it to communicate with customers and fixed earth stations.