Latency Or Satellite Shortcomings?
There is all this talk of distance affecting latency which doesn't seem to wash. If the signal has to travel 88,000 miles latency shouldn't be an issue when the speed of light is considered. Traveling...
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Latency is a measurement of time delay in any kind of system. In satellite communications, it’s the length of time that it takes a signal to travel from your home to the satellite in orbit above the Earth), and then down to a ground-based gateway which connects you to the internet. Each leg of that journey is about 22,300 miles, which sounds like a long way until you realize that our signal travels at the speed of light ( 186,282 miles per second). The whole round-trip is measured in milliseconds, often referred to as “ping.” The ping on satellite internet is usually around 638 ms, compared to ping of 30 ms or less on a typical cable network.
Edit: You say your latency improves at night. How are you measuring it? The most accurate method for measuring latency is by pinging a server. If you're using anything else, you're getting inaccurate data.
Each time a data packet ‘hops’ (that is, is handled by a device along the path) several milliseconds of latency are added. The physics involved account for approximately 550 milliseconds of latency, a limitation shared by all satellite providers.
In addition to transmission times, there are other factors that contribute to the total latency experienced by the end user, factors such as the network itself, IP/satellite translation overhead, speed of upstream connections, and traffic (congestion).
All of these variables combined contribute to and account for the differences you see in latency measurements.
