… or is it ?
If you are used to thousands of megabits of data flowing through your internet connection at home or at the office chances are you are going to find satellite internet extremely slow.
As you might know satellite communication is expensive … very very very expensive and depending on the data communication budget you will most likely not have the same speed as your terrestrial counterparts.
So you might think that all will be solved with higher speed … well, maybe yes maybe no.
When downloading large files (pictures, movies, large documents, presentations, …) it will in the end depend on the maximum speed you can send or receive that large chunk of data.
If however you are browsing the internet and visiting websites that have pages with a lot of content on them then it is most likely the latency that is slowing you down and you might have the impression that your connection is slow while it is actually the roundtrip time that is making it seem slow.
Let’s say you are browsing the web on different types of connections. Here’s how latency would “feel”:
Satellite Internet Connection (High Speed, High Latency): You would click a link on a web page and, after a noticeable delay, the web page would start downloading and show up almost all at once.
GSM Connection (Low Speed, Low Latency): The web page will start loading immediately. However, it will take a while to load completely and you will see images load one-by-one.
Cable Internet Connection (High Speed, Low Latency): the web page will appear almost immediately, downloading almost all at once.
Keep in mind that latency is important on how your internet experience will be and increasing your speed might not be a solution whereas decreasing the latency would.
When experiencing latency issues … contact your satellite ISP, he will be more than happy to look into this matter more deeply for you.