Satellite Internet and Performance

From a performance standpoint satellite leaves much to be desired when compared to other broadband offerings. With less bandwidth, usability restrictions, and unavoidable latency, satellite is not for everyone.

Satellite Internet provides upstream speeds between 50 to 150 Kbps, and download speeds of about 150Kbps to 1200 Kbps. This is about half the speed of most DSL, and less than a third the speed of most cable Internet access. To many consumers this simply isn’t worth the expenditure.

Unfortunately, many satellite providers also have a Fair Access Policy, or FAP. A FAP will decrease a user’s throughput down to around dial up speeds after a certain amount of data transfers occur. This amount is variable with the service but tends to be around 200MB per day and the decrease in bandwidth tends to last around 24 hours. Of course most customers want broadband to speed up large downloads, and a FAP can decrease that value down to almost nothing.

Latency is unavoidable in any Internet connection, the trick is to optimize a connection to avoid as much of it as possible. When one on the user’s hops is in orbital space, latency becomes a bigger issue. Signal delay to a satellite ranges from around 500 to 900 milliseconds, and this isn’t including any standard hops. This is because the signal must travel 22,000 miles into space, and then return to earth.

This latency can render many business applications unusable, and any software that requires real-time user input will be problematic at best. Our best advice is to avoid satellite internet unless it is absolutely necessary.