Huge variations in jitter that occurs randomly is a hard thing to reliably simulate. For example simulating a US/48-states consumer grade Ku or Ka-band VSAT service ($85-115/mo) which is a highly oversubscribed TDMA network.

When capacity in your particular spot beam is good, latency could be 550 to 600 ms end to end. When it's bad it could be 1300 or 1700ms and will jitter around randomly anywhere in between those two figures.

I think your standard for huge variation in latency could use some updating. A factor of 2-4 increase over baseline latency would be a huge improvement for many terrestrial WiFi systems. And services like Gogo in-flight WiFi have been shown to degrade to over 10 seconds of latency when congested.

Excellent point..

one of my first gigs was troubleshooting an application failure over a low bandwidth dedicated link - everything worked fine until the traffic volume resulted in scheduling jitter due to buffer latency; the resulting added overhead of continual connection renegotiation operations killed what was rest of the link the link and caused the failure to propagate into the application itself..

thankfully this oversight led to me as an intern needing to perform the experiment to 'prove' the point, and a subsequent job offer.. so at least there was that :)