"Satellite broadband" covers two very different things now, and the difference comes down to one number: how far the satellite is from the ground. That distance drives latency — and latency is what makes older satellite feel sluggish while Starlink feels like a normal broadband line.
Geostationary (GEO): far away, always overhead
Traditional satellite broadband — Tooway, Viasat and similar — uses satellites in geostationary orbit, about 35,786 km up. That height is deliberate: at that altitude a satellite orbits at the same rate the Earth turns, so it appears fixed in the sky and your dish can point at one spot forever.
The trade-off is distance. Every packet travels up ~35,000 km and back — and then the reply does the same. Even at the speed of light that's a round trip of roughly 600–700 milliseconds. Physics, not the provider, sets that floor.
Low-earth orbit (LEO): close, and moving fast
Starlink uses thousands of satellites in low-earth orbit, around 550 km up — over 60× closer. The round trip drops to roughly 20–40 ms, comparable to a fixed line. The catch is that each satellite whips across the sky, so you need a constellation of them and a phased-array dish that hands off between satellites seamlessly — which is exactly what Starlink is.
Why latency matters more than headline speed
People fixate on Mbps, but for how a connection feels, latency often matters more:
- Voice & video calls — 600 ms of lag makes conversations stutter and overlap; 30 ms is natural.
- VPNs & remote desktop — every keystroke and click waits for a round trip, so high latency makes remote work painful.
- SCADA & real-time control — polling and control loops are far happier with low, consistent latency.
- General browsing — modern pages make dozens of requests; each one pays the latency tax, so high-latency links feel slow even when "speed" looks fine.
Does GEO still have a place?
Occasionally — for pure one-way bulk transfer or as a last-resort bearer where nothing else reaches. But for the vast majority of operational sites, LEO plus a 4G/5G backup is simply better on every axis that matters: latency, throughput and reachability.
If you're weighing up options — or still on an old Tooway or Viasat service — the right move is to measure what your site can actually get and design around it. Request a quote and we'll do exactly that.