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I doubt the transmission path is longer, fiber optic cables aren't laid in perfectly straight lines between all points.
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I mean with satellite it's longer. You have to go up and down, and starlink sats prefer sending data streams back to the ground as soon as they can (because the laser interconnect capacity is limited).

And variable, no less due to the high differential speed of the satellites. And the signal conditioning is much more involved than on the ground.

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