Satellites in geostationary orbits are able to relay broadband information from the satellite company to each buyer. Satellite internet is generally among the most costly techniques of gaining broadband internet access, but in agricultural areas it could be the sole choice aside from cellular broadband.The costs have been coming down in recent times to a point where it is getting more competitive with other broadband options.

Satellite internet services cover areas where DSL and wire access cannot reach. Satellite offers less network bandwidth compared to DSL or other technologies. Additionally, the long delays needed to broadcast information between the satellite and the ground stations have a tendency to create high network latency, causing a sluggish performance experience in some cases. Network applications like VPN and internet games may not function correctly over satellite internet connections due to these latency issues.

Older home satellite internet services supported only one-way downloads over the satellite link, requiring a phone modem for uploading. All recent satellite services support both-way satellite linking. It is not obligatory that satellite internet service doesn't utilize WiMAX. Regardless of whether all the signaling delays are eliminated, it takes electronic radio waves about 5 hundred milliseconds, or half a second, to go from ground level to the satellite and back to the ground, a total of over 71,400 km (44,366 miles) to go from the source to the destination, and over 143,000 km (88,856 miles) for a round trip (user to ISP, and then back to user with nil network delays).

Factoring in other standard delays from network sources gives a standard one-way connection latency of 500700 milliseconds from the user to the ISP, or about 1, 0001,400 milliseconds latency for the total Round Trip Time (RTT) back to the user. Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites however don't have such great delays. The present LEO constellations of Globalstar and Iridium satellites have delays of less than forty milliseconds per round trip, but their data transmission is less than broadband at 64 kbps per channel.

The Globalstar constellation orbit has 1420 km above the earth and Iridium orbits at 670 km altitude. The suggested O3b Networks MEO constellation booked for deployment in 2010 would orbit at 8,062 km, with RTT latency of roughly 125 ms. The suggested new network is also designed for far higher data transmission with links well above one Gbps (Giga bits per second).