Yes, it turns out I'm wrong about them not doing inter-satellite links.

Yes, they had these plans from the get-go so launching the necessary hardware is not surprising. The question was whether anything like that went live

Once it does go live, anyone could see the lower ping between two users of this network. If they say it got enabled, that wouldn't be hard to independently verify

Do you have a source for this claim?

Since when? Last I heard this was just vaporware.