[FrankZ]

Part of the latency is directly related to the distance. Light is fast but it only goes so fast and with the distances that occur the times add up. Most sat connections see latency of more than 700ms which is huge in networking. Couple that with any manipulations that happen at the provider and it adds up even more. I was in SC recently to help an exec with his connection. He uses directway and I was seeing ping times of more than 1 second. Couple that with anything that is packet intensive (Citrix in this case) and it makes for a very poor user experience.

Anther applications that would be of interest is VOIP. VOIP tends to use lots of small packets which doesn't lend itself to efficent packet shaping. That coupled with timeouts that can occur causing TCP retransmits helps to compund the issues.

Another issue is sat connections tend to be asymetric with the upload speeds very low compared to the download speeds. This can cause issues if you try to do more than one thing at a time. Browsing websites while waiting for a file to download can saturate the upload channel as it sometimes isn't large enough to handle the number of ACKs. This happens on some cheaper broadband connections as well where you see 1.5M/96K speeds.