"The problem with satellite is 22300 miles up and 22300 back.
The speed of electricity is the same on a phone line as it is on a T-1."
WELL GUESS WHAT,
radio signals (sat signals) travel at the speed of light 186,000 miles per second,
electricity travels at ready 186,000 miles per second
it isn't the speed of the signal but rather all the extra handling that get in the way
Dmdchief would get a prize - if there were one, that is - for pointing out (correctly) that the distance isn't the biggest part of the problem.
The typical propagation delay (i.e. "signal transmission time") for a satellite connection is not horribly unreasonable - it's on the rough order of about 250 ms (round trip). And 1/4 second is right in the range of the latency associated with a telephone modem. So why, we ask, is satellite so much worse (in general) than a modem for flying?
The real problem is packet queuing and scheduling - remember, a satellite connection isn't "point to point", like a telephone line. It's a radio broadcast - and you are sharing the bandwidth of the satellite channel with every other satellite user. And as a result, by far the largest component of latency on a satellite connection comes from the time it takes for the system to get around to sending you your packets, and in you waiting to send yours up - imagine 10,000 laptop users trying to share one WIFI connection and you start to get the idea.
When you think about it, it's pretty close to miracle how far sat connections (speaking generally) have come in the last few years in eliminating jitter. If there's one thing that's more detrimental to Internet-based game play than latency, it's drastic variations in latency. Jitter is what causes warping, not latency.
And you might as well give up - many of the folks who've never lived in a truly remote area just don't get it and aren't going to. They have an entirely inaccurate set of preconceived assumptions based upon their own experiences that's in no way representative of the reality you face. You might as well be discussing calculus with a hamster.
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