Some homes sit miles from the nearest cable line, past the point where the phone company stops running new copper. For those locations, the internet doesn't arrive through the ground at all. It comes down from the sky, bounced off a device orbiting the planet.
CompTIA A+ Core 1 (220-1201) Objective 2.7 covers common internet connection types, and satellite is one of the technologies you're expected to recognize. In exam terms, you need to know how satellite service works at a high level, what makes it different from cable, fiber, or DSL, where it wins, and where its weaknesses show up. On the job, that knowledge helps you set expectations for customers, install the hardware correctly, and troubleshoot the problems that are specific to a signal traveling through space.
This article walks through the hardware a technician actually touches, the orbits that decide how the service performs, and the real-world limits, such as latency, weather, and data caps, that come up constantly in support calls.
Satellite internet sends your data up to orbit and back
Satellite internet connects a customer's location to the internet using a radio link between a dish on the ground and a communications satellite in orbit. There is no cable running to the house from the provider. Instead, the customer's equipment transmits and receives data through the air, and the satellite relays that traffic to a ground station that is wired into the internet backbone.
The path a single request takes is longer than most people expect. Your computer sends data to an indoor modem, which passes it to the outdoor dish. The dish beams the signal up to the satellite. The satellite forwards it to a large ground station, often called a gateway or teleport, which connects to the wider internet. The response follows the same path in reverse. Every web page, video, and email makes that full round trip.
This is why satellite is described as a "last resort" or "last mile" solution in many courses. It exists to serve places where wired options are impractical: rural homes, remote job sites, farms, ships, and disaster areas where the ground infrastructure is damaged or absent. For the exam, the key idea is that satellite trades performance and cost for reach. It can deliver internet almost anywhere with a clear view of the sky, but it pays a price in latency and, historically, in speed and data limits.
The orbit height explains almost every strength and weakness
The single most important factor in how satellite internet performs is how high the satellite orbits. That distance controls latency, coverage, and the size of the customer equipment. There are two orbit types you should know.
Geostationary orbit, usually called GEO, sits roughly 35,786 km (about 22,236 miles) above the equator. At that height, a satellite circles the Earth at the same rate the planet rotates, so it appears to stay fixed in one spot in the sky. That fixed position is a real advantage for installation. Because the satellite doesn't move relative to the ground, a customer's dish can be aimed once at a single point and left there permanently. Traditional providers like HughesNet and Viasat use GEO satellites.
Low Earth orbit, called LEO, sits much closer, typically a few hundred to around 2,000 km up. Starlink is the best-known LEO service. Because these satellites are so much closer, the round trip for data is far shorter, which dramatically reduces latency. The trade-off is that a LEO satellite does not stay in one place. It races across the sky and drops below the horizon in minutes, so a single satellite can't provide continuous service. LEO systems solve this with large constellations of thousands of satellites and a self-aiming dish that constantly tracks whichever satellite is overhead and hands off to the next one.
| Feature | GEO satellite | LEO satellite |
|---|---|---|
| Altitude | ~35,786 km | ~300–2,000 km |
| Latency | High (often 500–600+ ms) | Low (often 20–50 ms) |
| Dish aiming | Fixed, aimed once | Self-tracking, motorized |
| Example services | HughesNet, Viasat | Starlink |
| Satellites needed | Few | Thousands |
When a question describes very high latency and a fixed dish, think GEO. When it describes low latency, a phased-array dish that aims itself, and a constellation of satellites, think LEO.
Latency is satellite's defining limitation
Latency is the delay between sending data and getting a response, measured in milliseconds. It matters more on satellite than on almost any other connection type, and it's the detail the exam most wants you to associate with satellite.
The cause is simple physics. Radio signals travel at the speed of light, which is fast but not instant. A GEO satellite sits over 35,000 km up, and the signal has to travel up to the satellite, down to the gateway, back up, and back down for every exchange. That distance alone adds a large fixed delay no equipment can remove. In practice, GEO satellite latency often runs 500 to 600 milliseconds or more, and it can climb higher under load.
That delay is fine for activities that don't need instant responses. Streaming video, downloading files, browsing web pages, and sending email all tolerate high latency reasonably well because the data flows in one direction once the connection starts. The delay becomes a serious problem for anything interactive and real-time. Online gaming, video calls, and remote desktop sessions feel sluggish or unusable on high-latency GEO links, because every action waits on that long round trip.
This is exactly why LEO services matter. By moving the satellites close, LEO can bring latency down to figures that compete with wired broadband, often in the 20 to 50 millisecond range. That makes video calls and gaming practical for the first time on satellite. When a customer's main complaint is lag during calls or games rather than raw download speed, the orbit type is the root of it.
The dish, LNB, and modem make up the customer equipment
A satellite installation has a small number of parts, and you should be able to name them and describe what each does.
The dish, or antenna, is the parabolic reflector mounted outside the building. Its curved shape collects the faint incoming signal and focuses it onto a receiver at the dish's focal point. On GEO systems this dish is fixed once it's aimed.