ke of simplicity, let’s say the customer’s satellite dish is on the equator and directly below the satellite, placing the satellite exactly 22,236 miles away. If the signal travels that distance 4 times, that’s 88,944 miles. These signals are in the electromagnetic spectrum, so they travel at the speed of light (186,282 miles/second). Something going that fast takes ~0.48 seconds to make the entire trip. So if you use a satellite in geostationary orbit, you will wait at least half a second before the page even begins to load, no matter what!
As far as an Internet connection goes, that’s forever.
Once a connection is established, it’s also pretty slow compared to a wired connection. One reason for this is because sending hardware to space is expensive. The cheapest satellite launches for communications satellites right now are around $60 million, and that’s not even including the cost of the satellite itself – easily hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases. Once the hardware is in space, it’s not really possible to change it either, so the company is stuck with years-old satellites meant to deliver lower speeds than what might be possible today. Generally, the fewer satellites a company needs, the cheaper it is, so satellite Internet providers don’t want to launch a lot of extra satellites. And since many customers share each satellite, speeds slow down and bandwidth caps make sure no one uses “too much”.
Besides moving, there aren’t really many other options for rural Internet right now. Cell towers work, but they are also spread thin in rural areas and have data caps. If a cell tower is close enough to your house to be reliable, that’s great, but in many places that’s unlikely.
So let’s make satellite Internet better. How? Move the satellite closer.
Satellites orbiting in Low Earth Orbit are much closer at 100-1200 miles. If there were a satellite 400 miles away, we could communicate with an ISP’s request processing place in about 0.01 second. That pretty much eliminates the issue of lag for gaming, delayed page loading, and requests timing out.
It would work, but it needs a lot of satellites. Objects in low earth orbit (like the space station) cross the sky in just a few minutes. That means that your satellite dish needs to find a new satellite continuously. It also means mean a LOT of satellites in operation at once, and that’s expensive. You would also need a more complicated satellite dish at your house to find multiple satellites simultaneously and point at them. Those are a few reasons why we don’t have really fast satellite Internet – yet.
The most notable company working on a Low Earth Orbit satellite constellation is SpaceX, who have also been doing this lately:
They want to make access to space cheaper by reusing the rocket, which would make it easier to loft satellites into position to beam down cat gifs to rural consumers. Anyone in a rural area should be rooting for more cell towers and SpaceX success, as they seem to be your best hope for high-quality internet within the next 10 years.
PS: Here’s a SpeedTest result for anyone interested: