> I'm sure Starlink will be better in some way, but it's almost double...

The most important difference is that Viasat uses a couple of GEO satellites where Starlink uses a massive swarm of LEO satellites.

Viasat's satellites are flying just short of 35,800 kilometers over the equator, which means that your absolute best case scenario user standing right next to a gateway, both directly under the satellite, bare minimum latency connecting to an internet server is almost a full 500 milliseconds. Users not close to the equator can add a fair bit more.

Starlink's satellites are flying around 550 kilometers over basically everywhere with 53 degrees of the equator, so anyone who has a gateway close enough to not need to use the inter-satellite link can get 20-40 millisecond latency to the internet in real world usage.

They only recently enabled end user access to inter-satellite links so I haven't seen any real world tests on that but it could be a lot worse than single-hop while still beating GEO.

As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities. It can suck a bit for voice and video calls (but not as bad as you might think). Online fast paced gaming is of course out of the question.

> As long as you have bandwidth latency really isn’t that important for most activities.

As someone who recently spent a week at a vacation house that had HughesNet, you have no idea how wrong this is.

Every single individual request your browser makes has an extra half second attached to it even starting. Every TLS handshake takes a full second and a half, multiplied by every different host you're connecting to while loading content. Every packet lost (and there will be a few) has an extra half second to be resent. Downloading files over satellite internet isn't the worst thing in the world, but browsing the web over it is not an enjoyable experience. It feels like back when I was still on dialup while most of the internet had started to assume broadband.

The main reason QUIC exists as a protocol, aside from working around decades worth of horrible middleboxes that prevent new protocols from working on top of IP directly, is to reduce the number of back-and-forths required to establish secure communication which most significantly benefits high latency and mildly lossy connections like satellite and older cellular networks.

I've done paid work on an airplane WiFi connection through Viasat and really did not find the latency to be an issue at all, including working in the terminal.

No doubt everyone has different experiences and tolerance levels for latency, but, really, I think the latency issue is vastly overblown.

There is something beautiful in humanity's advancement to the point that we're debating the feasibility of playing multi-person video games over satellite internet while hurtling through the air at 500mph in a pressurized tube.