current satellite internet is also in geostationary orbit (22k miles):

    IP Gateway REDACTED
    Packet Loss 0%
    Average Delay 621 ms
    Minimum Delay 570 ms
    Maximum Delay 650 ms

that's to satellite. here's a traceroute to show you actual times:

    traceroute to 8.8.8.8 (8.8.8.8), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
     1  10.0.1.1  1.941 ms  0.933 ms  0.930 ms
     2  192.168.42.1  2.535 ms  1.232 ms  1.313 ms
     3  redacted  2.668 ms  1.366 ms  2.584 ms
     4  67.45.0.65  601.534 ms  569.407 ms  600.134 ms
     5  67.45.5.5  1483.616 ms  615.166 ms  620.347 ms

i managed to get this low of traceroute times as the clouds happened to be gone for the moment, but given that i live in the nw, that is a fluke :)

an article on LEO options from SpaceX notes the same latency: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/space...

i'd love something as low as 300ms (or the 25ms that LEO is promising), but it's just not going to happen.

Why don't you think the lower latency LEO is going to happen?

ah, my note was that i'd love something as low as the 300ms that math seems to think we'd have, and the 25ms that LEO should provide - that's where my skepticism lies.

as for whether an LEO solution will occur for rural americans? the monetary math for that doesn't make much more sense to me, but lots of things get deployed that don't make monetary sense so that's at least possible.

That's a lot better than existing sat based solutions. if the throughput could get close to 4g speeds I'd see it as a legitimate contender, but there are still some applications it will never really be viable for unless you can build some sort of network of the things and circumvent most of the terrestrial network entirely until you get really close to the destination, But even with that I doubt it could get much better.