ergophobe - 12:15 am on Dec 16, 2011 (gmt 0)

Not to divert, but satelite is slow in general. Viasat has just launched a satelite that is advertised to make true 1.5Mbps possible for many users, but no matter how you cut it, every request makes the trip to geosynchronous orbit and back 4 times (click - up to satelite - down to server - up to satelite - down to your computer).

That 4x trip takes .5 seconds. So if you think of a page with an image, you have to request the page, then once it's loaded, request the image. That means 1 second of travel time at the speed of light without even considering going through the switches and server response time.

So as a bare min, you are looking at 1.2 seconds from click to image render. If all goes really well.

It's total hell on things like GMail who often think you're disconnected because the min response time on a ping is .5 sec.

All of this to say that I only use a laptop at home and I try to make it not do updates (virus sigs, windows patches or whatever) when I'm home, but to wait until I'm on a "fast" connection by our standards (when it's behaving well, it's 1.3Mbps. No chance of going faster than that until our phone system is upgraded or an entirely new technology comes along).