I have been on Starlink for a little more than a month, received and activated my kit on Oct 27. I am in Zambia for context. Ping to EU servers fluctuate wildly. It can be as low as 140ms for 20-40 seconds, and then jump up to 220-250ms for a minute or so, and then jump up to over 300ms for another 20-40 seconds, before diving back down to sub 200ms.
The reason we have wildly fluctuating latency is due to our data being beamed inter-satellite via lasers before being transmitted to the ground at the Nigeria ground station. Currently, it is the only ground station in Africa in operation, so all African countries face this same issue except Nigeria. I speculate that the ping fluctuations are due to limited satellites in the Starlink constellation with inter-satellite communication capability. If you read up on Starlink you will realise that only the ver 1.5 and later units can transmit data between themselves. This means that the majority of satellites in the constellation cannot carry data back to Nigeria and the ground station. So all our data is currently handled by the ver 1.5 and later units, which probably means our data sometimes goes back to Nigeria in an optimal and short distance, and at other times in a very roundabout way. This I believe is the reason why our ping jumps all over the place.
Ping to South African servers are about the same as EU, which is why I have kept my LTE connection for gaming on SA servers. From Zambia I average around 50ms to Dota 2, CoD, BF, and CS2 servers.
