So what are they doing about the latency problem with Sat internet connections?

Unless this is somehow addressed it won't get much of a foothold against DSL or WIFI.

The average home user wants VOIP and gaming, latency critical apps.

Not unless they can do something about the 250ms latency imposed by the speed of light on a round trip to geostationary orbit. It's a great solution for folks who will never get a cable or DSL connexion, but it can never be a replacement for land-based technologies.

"The ViaSat-1 will have a throughput of about 100Gb/s... ViaSat claims the satellite will let distributors price a basic service at 2Mb/s... It's expected to be able to provide service to about two million subscribers."

So they're expecting to provide service of 1,000Gb/s (512Kb/s) to 4,000Gb/s (2Mb/s) from a 100Gb/s satellite? It's good to see the practice of massively overselling capacity is alive and well.

And am I the only one who thinks even 2Mb/s will be virtually useless by the time this is launched? With the massive increase in size (and thus bandwidth) used by most websites in recent years, even 2Mb/s will look like dial-up speed for anything other than email. I'm sure some people in rural areas (or for whatever reason can't get high-speed Internet through other means) will be happy to wait 10-20 seconds for each page to load, but most others will probably think it's not worth the cost they'll have to pay for it.

It's unlikely to be "in orbit over North America". More likely to be "in orbit over Ecuador", or some other place on the equator. That is, after all, where geosynchronous orbits need to be.

Shirley?

ok not so good for games, passable for IM, though obviously not ideal, but for stuff like p2p, or anything like email or general web surfing its probably fine.

depends on the price they charge. if they offer it as "unfiltered, limited only by bandwidth" i.e. no specific throttling but when its full it slows down. it may fly.

especially if the link kit to upload/download is a black box on an ethernet wire (or wifi) thats easy to set up. make it need a phone line for the uplink and its dead in the water. if you have a phone line you don't need it.

it comes down to price. slow but cheap? or no bandwidth caps but slow? or seriously fast, cheap but limited and they may have a chance.

limit it in any serious way, or have the connection kit seriously expensive and its dead.

if i coudl sign up as follows:

- I buy the kit, then a per month sub (no contract other than 30 day) for a reasonable price - tick

- you supply the kit free, with a tweleve month sub for a reasonable price - maybe, but I'll let someone else try it first)

I'd look at the price for a years usage at my expected bandwidth (sub 2GB/month)