Satellite internet connects you without relying on buried cables. A small dish at your home or business sends a radio signal to a satellite overhead, which passes it to a ground station connected to the regular internet. The response travels back along the same route, no trenches, poles, or line crews needed.
That back-and-forth happens every time you load a page, join a video call, or play a game. Because each signal has to make the full trip, the distance to the satellite matters more with satellite internet than with almost any other type of connection.
The Signal Path, Step by Step
A satellite internet connection completes four hops on every request. Your device talks to a dish, or in newer systems a flat phased-array antenna, mounted with a clear view of the sky. The dish beams that signal up to a satellite. The satellite either relays it directly to a ground station, called a gateway, or bounces it between multiple satellites first if the network uses inter-satellite links. The gateway hands the traffic off to fiber lines that carry it into the ordinary internet. A newer variant skips the dish entirely and talks straight to an ordinary phone. See direct-to-cell satellite for how that connection works.
- User terminal. The dish or antenna at your location, aimed automatically or fixed depending on the system.
- Satellite. Receives the uplink signal, may process or simply relay it, and sends it back down.
- Gateway (ground station). A facility, often in a rural area with a clear sky view, that bridges the satellite network to fiber backbone.
- Backbone. The same fiber infrastructure every other internet connection eventually rides on.
Every one of those hops adds a fraction of a second. Add them up and the total is small enough to ignore for a satellite in low orbit, and large enough to notice immediately for one in a much higher, fixed orbit.
Low Orbit vs. High Orbit Decides the Speed
The single biggest factor in how a satellite internet connection feels is how far up the satellite sits, not how much bandwidth the network sells. Starlink, built by SpaceX, flies its satellites 340 to 570 kilometers up, in what engineers call low Earth orbit (LEO). Older providers such as Viasat and HughesNet use geostationary orbit (GEO), a single fixed point roughly 22,236 miles above the equator.
That gap in altitude shows up directly in latency. An IEEE Communications Society analysis of Q1 2025 network data put Starlink’s median latency at 45 milliseconds, versus 683 milliseconds for HughesNet and 684 milliseconds for Viasat. That is a 15-to-20x difference. The reason is geometry. A GEO signal has to travel roughly 44,472 miles round trip no matter what. A LEO signal travels a small fraction of that distance. Those figures move as networks add satellites and gateways, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a fixed number.
| LEO (Starlink, Amazon Leo, OneWeb) | GEO (Viasat, HughesNet) | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical altitude | 340 to 570 km | ~22,236 miles |
| Typical latency | 25 to 60 ms | 600+ ms |
| Good for real-time gaming or video calls | Yes, in most cases | Rarely |
| Satellites needed for global coverage | Thousands | A handful |
| Where it tends to win | Rural broadband, mobile, maritime | Legacy no-cable-alternative markets |
The tradeoff runs the other way for coverage. A GEO satellite stares at the same third of the planet permanently, so one satellite can blanket a huge, fixed area. A LEO network needs thousands of satellites constantly moving overhead to guarantee one is always in view, which is why building a competitive LEO constellation costs far more up front than launching a handful of GEO birds.
How Weather Affects the Signal
Rain, wet snow, and thick storm clouds absorb and scatter the radio frequencies most satellite systems use, an effect called rain fade. It hits every satellite internet provider to some degree, GEO and LEO alike, since the physics is the same regardless of altitude. Modern systems fight it with adaptive coding that automatically drops the data rate and boosts error correction during a storm, or with a LEO network’s ability to hand a connection off to a different satellite with a clearer path. Most users see a brief slowdown or a few dropped seconds during heavy weather, not a full outage. A severe storm can still knock service out entirely for a short window.
Satellite Internet vs. Fiber, Cable, and 5G
Satellite internet is not competing to replace fiber, cable, or 5G in places those networks already reach. Fiber remains the latency and reliability leader anywhere a provider has run the line, because light in glass beats radio waves bounced off a satellite on both counts. Cable networks split that difference: slower than fiber, but built into far more neighborhoods already. 5G home internet uses cell towers instead of satellites or buried cable, which makes it cheaper to deploy than fiber but still limited to areas within range of a tower.
Satellite internet wins the one comparison that matters most to a rural household or a ship at sea: it does not need any ground infrastructure between the provider and the customer. A dish with a clear view of the sky can get service on a mountain, a boat, or a farm miles from the nearest cable line. That is also its ceiling. Even the fastest LEO system shares bandwidth across a wide coverage area, so a satellite connection during a regional usage spike behaves differently than a dedicated fiber line that serves one address.
Who Is Building Satellite Internet Networks
Four networks account for most of the current buildout. Starlink leads by satellite count and is already selling service in dozens of countries. Amazon is building a competing LEO network under the Leo brand, formerly named Project Kuiper. Amazon’s own mission-progress page reported more than 375 satellites launched as of mid-2026, while the company works toward a Federal Communications Commission deployment deadline. Our Project Kuiper explained page covers whether the service is available to order yet. Eutelsat OneWeb runs a third LEO network aimed heavily at enterprise and government customers rather than consumers. China’s Qianfan constellation, developed with Chinese state backing, is being built explicitly as a Starlink alternative for countries aligned with China’s Belt and Road initiative, though it has run well behind its own satellite-count targets so far. Qianfan and the separate state network Guowang are compared on the China satellite constellations page.
Price is the other half of that comparison, and our Starlink pricing page covers what the largest low-orbit provider charges for hardware and each monthly tier. For a side-by-side comparison across every major provider rather than one at a time, see our best satellite internet providers roundup. Anyone comparing a satellite internet plan today should start by confirming which orbit the provider uses, since that single fact predicts gaming performance, video-call quality, and general responsiveness better than any advertised speed number on its own.