... But there's dramatically less when you put the satellites much closer to earth, as they're planning to do here. These are LEO satellites, not the far-away geostationary stuff you see with older communication satellites.
In fact, if they enable satellite to satellite communication (like e.g. Iridium) and get full worldwide coverage, there's no reason why they couldn't in theory delivery much shorter roundtrip times than what we get between many locations over wired networks, given how much traffic takes huge detours today for various reasons. E.g. lots of European traffic to parts of Asia still goes the "long way around" via the US because it's a far better served route thanks to massive amount of undersea capacity going in/out of the US to pretty much everywhere, while the land routes to parts of Asia are fraught with problems.
Being able to ignore political boundaries, war zones, problems with theft and vandalism and other concerns that often limit the placement of over-land long distance cables has a huge potential value in itself.
