Broadband Shuffle

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

> How is latency?  That's the one complaint I always hear against satellite.
> I know a few people with it, one of whom I believe uses Starband, and he
> can never get better than 500 ms ping times to anything a hop or two away.
> Download speeds are great, though from what I hear, just don't try an ssh
> session unless you're patient. =)


The latency is high, and it's inherent to the medium. After all, you 
have a path length (round trip) of at least 90,000 miles (plus whatever 
the length of the terrestrial path to the site being pinged is), since a 
geostationary satellite is in an orbit about 22,500 miles above the 
earth. That means you have a speed of light (186,000 mi/sec) delay of 
about half a second.