Hughesnet Gen4

The latency of a satellite system will never be real good simply because of speed of light issues. The satellite sits over the equator at ~23,000 miles above the earth. That makes the distance to the satellite from the ground on the order of 40,000 miles including the slant distance. So the total path from you to the ground station is ~80,000 miles. At 186,000 miles per second it takes your mouse click roughly 0.4 sec to get to the ground station. If there was no delay in its response the ground station's return signal to you will take another 0.4 sec. That's why the latency of Hughesnet varies between 0.75-1.0 sec. It is virtually unusable for any real-time application.