How Satellite Internet Works: LEO vs GEO Explained [2026]

Satellite internet works by bouncing your data off a spacecraft: your dish sends a radio signal up to a satellite, the satellite relays it to a ground station wired into the fibre backbone, and the answer comes back the same way. Everything that makes one satellite service feel like fibre and another feel broken comes down to one number in that loop — how far the signal has to travel. Starlink’s satellites sit about 550 kilometres up. Viasat’s and HughesNet’s sit at 35,786 kilometres. That 65-fold difference in altitude is the whole story of LEO versus GEO, and it shows up directly in what you feel: roughly 20-40 milliseconds of round-trip latency on a low-Earth-orbit link against 600 milliseconds and up on a geostationary one. The orbital-mechanics section below derives both figures from the speed of light so you can check them with a calculator.

This guide maps the full data path, the orbital mechanics behind it, the hardware on your roof, and the regulatory machinery that decides whether the service is legal where you live — including the US-specific availability and subsidy rules that decide what you can actually order. Every load-bearing number is either a physical constant you can recompute yourself, an operator disclosure, or an independent measurement — each one dated and linked. Last reviewed: 28 September 2026.

What Satellite Internet Is and Who Uses It

Satellite internet is a broadband access method that replaces the last-mile cable with a radio link to a spacecraft in orbit. No trench, no pole, no exchange — just a dish with a clear view of the sky and a modem. It is the only broadband technology whose deployment cost does not rise with distance from a city, which is exactly why it fills the gaps terrestrial networks never reach.

Four groups dominate the subscriber base worldwide:

• Rural and remote households — the core market. Farms, mountain valleys, islands and scattered settlements where fibre economics collapse and fixed wireless has no line of sight.
• Maritime — commercial shipping, fishing fleets, superyachts and cruise operators. Crew connectivity has shifted from a perk to a retention requirement, and LEO capacity at sea has grown faster than almost any other segment through 2025-2026.
• Aviation — airlines retrofitting cabins with LEO terminals to replace GEO systems that made in-flight video calls impractical.
• Emergency, government and enterprise backup — disaster response, mining and energy sites, construction camps, and failover circuits for retail and banking branches.

Do you actually need satellite, or can you get fibre?

Check terrestrial options first, in this order: fibre to the premises, cable or VDSL, then fixed 5G or 4G with an external antenna. If any of those delivers a stable connection, it will almost always beat satellite on latency consistency, price per gigabyte and resistance to weather. Satellite wins when the alternatives are a congested cell edge, a copper line under 10 Mbps, or nothing at all. For a fuller comparison of where each technology breaks down, see Starlink vs 5G and Fiber: When Satellite Beats Terrestrial Internet.

The other case where satellite is not a fallback but the first choice is infrastructure failure. When storms, floods or conflict take out towers and fibre routes, a terminal and a generator restore connectivity in hours rather than months, a pattern documented repeatedly in Starlink in Disaster Relief: Hurricane and Conflict Zone Connectivity.

Starlink availability is decided country by country rather than globally: as of September 2026 SpaceX’s own coverage and availability map lists service, waitlists or announced launch dates across more than 100 countries and territories, each entry backed by a separate authorisation from a national telecoms regulator. There is no single global switch, which is why a service that works on one side of a border can be entirely unavailable on the other — and why checking the official map for your exact address matters more than reading a continent-level headline. Within a licensed country, availability then narrows again to the individual cell, as the US section below shows.

LEO vs GEO vs MEO: Orbital Mechanics That Determine Performance

Orbital altitude is not a design preference. It fixes the orbital period, the number of satellites needed for coverage, and the minimum achievable latency, all through basic physics.

What Low Earth Orbit actually means

Low Earth Orbit is any orbit below roughly 2,000 km. At Starlink’s 550 km shell a satellite travels around 7.6 km per second and completes a lap in about an hour and a half, meaning it is overhead for only a few minutes at a time. Continuous service therefore demands a dense constellation plus terminals that can hand a session from one satellite to the next without the user noticing. Independent catalogue tracking — Jonathan McDowell’s Starlink statistics, built from US Space Force catalogue data, and the orbital element sets published by CelesTrak — put the operational Starlink fleet above 7,000 satellites through 2026, by a wide margin the largest constellation ever flown. Those two sources are the ones to check if you want a current count rather than a marketing figure, because both are updated from raw catalogue data rather than press releases.

Why GEO is stuck at 35,786 km

At exactly 35,786 km a circular equatorial orbit takes 24 hours, matching Earth’s rotation, so the satellite appears motionless in the sky. That is the geostationary belt defined and protected in the ITU Radio Regulations, the treaty text that also sets the power-flux limits non-geostationary constellations must respect to avoid interfering with it. It is a genuinely elegant engineering trade: one spacecraft covers roughly a third of the planet and the dish below never has to move.

The price is distance. You can check the arithmetic yourself with one formula — delay equals distance divided by the speed of light, 299,792 km/s:

• One hop of 35,786 km: 119 ms
• Four hops (dish → satellite → gateway, then gateway → satellite → dish) ≈ 143,144 km: 477 ms of pure propagation, before a single router touches the packet

Add modulation, queuing and terrestrial routing and real GEO consumer services land at 600 ms and up.

The quotable version: GEO latency is not an engineering failure that better hardware will fix. It is the speed of light multiplied by 143,000 kilometres, and no vendor can negotiate with that.

Run the same formula on a LEO link and the numbers change character completely. With the satellite directly overhead, four hops of 550 km total 2,200 km, or about 7 ms. When the satellite is low on the horizon the slant range stretches to roughly 1,100 km per hop, so the worst-case path is about 4,400 km, or roughly 15 ms. Either way the trip to space is a small slice of the 20-40 ms that Ookla’s satellite performance benchmarking and aggregated user tests report for Starlink in Europe and North America. The rest is scheduling, beam handover, gateway processing and terrestrial backhaul — the parts engineers can still improve. On GEO, 477 ms of the delay is untouchable before anyone optimises anything.

The Data Path: From Your Dish to the Internet Backbone

Here is what physically happens when you load a webpage over a LEO connection.

• 1. Terminal to satellite (uplink). The phased-array antenna forms an electronic beam aimed at whichever satellite is currently assigned to your cell and transmits in the Ku band (roughly 12-18 GHz), with Ka band (roughly 26.5-40 GHz) used heavily for gateway traffic. Nothing mechanical steers the beam; the array shifts phase across hundreds of elements.
• 2. Satellite routing. The satellite either drops the signal straight to a ground station within its footprint, or — on the newer spacecraft — forwards it across the constellation on laser inter-satellite links running at optical frequencies through vacuum, where light moves about 47% faster than in glass fibre.
• 3. Satellite to gateway (downlink). A ground station, typically a cluster of large parabolic antennas on a fenced pad, receives the traffic.
• 4. Gateway to backbone. The gateway is wired into fibre running to a point of presence where the operator peers with transit providers, CDNs and internet exchanges.
• 5. Return path. The response comes back through the same chain, often via a different satellite, because the one that carried your request has already moved on.

Counting hops in the satellite segment, a modern LEO path involves roughly four to six elements between terminal and public internet. Legacy GEO architectures interpose more: a distant satellite, a regional gateway, provider-side acceleration proxies and TCP-spoofing middleboxes that exist purely to paper over the delay. Those accelerators are why GEO speed tests can look respectable while the connection still feels sluggish — bulk throughput is optimised, interactivity is not.

Where the ground stations are

Gateways are placed near fibre, not near customers, and they are usually built inside the country they serve because most regulators require domestic landing of the traffic. You do not have to guess where they are: in the United States every earth-station application is public and searchable through the FCC’s International Bureau Filing System (IBFS), where SpaceX’s filings list named gateway sites including North Bend, Washington; Merrillan, Wisconsin; and Conrad, Montana — rural properties chosen for fibre proximity and a quiet radio environment rather than population. Equivalent filings sit with national authorities elsewhere, and the ITU’s space services department holds the international network notifications behind them.

Laser inter-satellite links have reduced the dependency on any single gateway: a terminal in the mid-Pacific or high Arctic can now route through several satellites to a ground station on land, which is precisely what made ocean, polar and gateway-less-country coverage practical.

User Terminals: Hardware That Makes LEO Work

The consumer terminal is the least glamorous and most demanding part of the system. It has to track satellites crossing the sky at 7.6 km/s, hand over between them every few minutes, and do it from a rectangle of electronics with no moving parts.

Standard Gen 3 specifications

• Field of view: about 110 degrees, wide enough to hold a satellite through most of its usable pass.
• Power draw: roughly 50 W average, with peaks near 75 W, per the specifications SpaceX publishes with the standard kit. That matters for off-grid installs — budget around 1.2 kWh per day for continuous operation and size solar and battery capacity accordingly.
• Frequencies: Ku band for the user link, Ka band on the gateway side.
• Mounting: a clear view of the northern or southern sky, depending on hemisphere, with no branches, chimneys or parapets in the cone. Obstruction, not weather, is the leading cause of disappointing installs.

Starlink price: hardware, service and the parts people forget

Starlink price has two components that are quoted separately and a third that is usually ignored until the installer arrives. As of Q3 2026 the residential order pages list standard consumer hardware in the $499-$599 band across most markets, with substantial regional variation once tax, shipping and local pricing decisions are applied, plus recurring promotions that cut or waive hardware cost in exchange for a service commitment. Monthly service is set per market and moves more often than the hardware price does. Roam and maritime kits are priced separately and higher, and the plan structure around them changes several times a year — the current shape of weekly, pausable and regional Roam options is tracked in Starlink for Digital Nomads: Portable Internet Across Borders. The third component is the mount: a standard ground stand ships in the box, but a pole, ridge or non-penetrating roof mount, plus longer cable, routinely adds a meaningful amount on top — and on a tile roof or a mast it is the installation labour, not the dish, that dominates the bill.

Cost and lead times

Fulfilment has compressed sharply. Where core markets once quoted multi-month waits, the order flow in well-served regions now typically shows delivery in about one to three weeks, while capacity-constrained or newly licensed markets still put customers on waitlists measured in one to three months. Regional cell congestion, not warehouse stock, is usually the limiting factor — the waitlist exists to protect the speeds of people already in the cell.

Installation, in practice

Most markets ship self-install kits, and the companion app uses the phone camera to scan the sky for obstructions before you commit to a mount point. Three mistakes account for most poor results: mounting under a tree line that is bare in winter and dense in summer; running the cable through a door or window where it gets crushed; and placing the router in a metal-walled outbuilding. Professional installation is worth paying for on tile roofs, tall masts and anywhere the mount needs engineering.

Why Latency Matters: Real-World Performance Differences

Bandwidth determines how fast a large file arrives. Latency determines whether the connection feels alive. Almost everything people complain about on legacy satellite is a latency symptom, not a bandwidth one.

The VPN case deserves explanation because it surprises people. Establishing a secure session takes several sequential round trips — TCP handshake, then TLS or IKE negotiation. At 600 ms per round trip, four round trips cost about 2.4 seconds before any payload moves, and every chatty enterprise protocol repeats that penalty on every transaction. The same exchange over a 30 ms LEO link costs about 120 ms. Nothing about the encryption changed; only the distance did.

On throughput, Ookla’s Speedtest Intelligence research, its published satellite comparisons and operator disclosures together put typical Starlink residential service in the 25-220 Mbps download and 5-20 Mbps upload range as of Q3 2026, with country medians generally sitting well inside that band rather than near the top of it. The spread is wide because LEO capacity is shared per cell: a lightly loaded rural cell can sustain the top of that range, while a saturated cell near a town drops toward the bottom during evening peak. Anyone evaluating the service should treat the midpoint as the planning figure, not the headline number, and should re-check the current quarter’s data rather than trusting a figure quoted in an older article.

Competing Technologies: How Starlink Stacks Against Viasat and HughesNet

Starlink is the largest consumer LEO operator, but it is not the only satellite option, and for some users it is not the right one. Before comparing satellite against satellite, it is worth knowing where the whole category loses to a terrestrial line — the thresholds are set out in Starlink vs 5G and Fiber: When Satellite Beats Terrestrial Internet. All figures below are as published in Q3 2026.

Both Viasat and HughesNet operate geostationary fleets exclusively for consumer broadband, a fact reflected in their published service specifications and in their parent companies’ investor filings. That is a structural constraint, not a temporary one: no firmware update moves a satellite closer. Where they remain competitive is coverage stability in equatorial and hard-to-serve regions, long-standing dealer and support networks, and installed bases with contracts already in place. If your household use is streaming, email and browsing, and GEO is what is licensed in your country, it still works — it simply will not support real-time interaction.

OneWeb, now inside Eutelsat, deliberately targets maritime, aviation, government and mobile-backhaul customers rather than households, selling through distribution partners. Amazon’s Kuiper programme — which Amazon has since marketed under the name Amazon Leo, per its own announcements — launched its first production satellites on 28 April 2025 and moved into limited enterprise and pilot service during 2026 without publishing broad consumer pricing, so any speed or price comparison against Starlink remains provisional until independent measurement exists at scale.

Regulatory and Spectrum: Why Satellite Internet Isn’t Everywhere

A satellite passing over your house does not mean you may legally connect to it. Every country controls the radio spectrum within its borders, and a foreign satellite operator needs explicit permission — commonly called landing rights — before selling service there.

Who grants permission

Authorisation comes from the national telecoms regulator: the FCC Space Bureau in the United States, Ofcom in the United Kingdom, ACMA in Australia, BNetzA in Germany, POTRAZ in Zimbabwe, BOCRA in Botswana, and the equivalent authority or state telecoms operator elsewhere. Above them, the ITU Radiocommunication Bureau records satellite network filings and coordinates frequency assignments internationally so that constellations do not interfere with one another or with existing fixed and terrestrial services. The division of labour is simple: the ITU allocates and registers; national regulators license.

What the approval actually involves

• Spectrum rights for Ku and Ka band use within the country, coordinated against incumbent users.
• Earth station licences for gateways, and in many jurisdictions type approval for the user terminal itself.
• Telecoms operator licensing, which in a number of markets requires a locally incorporated entity or a partnership with a domestic carrier.
• Lawful intercept and data residency obligations, requiring traffic to land on domestic gateways and be accessible to authorities under local law.

Five real licensing timelines, not an average

Generic advice about approval taking months is less useful than looking at what actually happened in specific markets. These cases, reconstructed from regulator announcements and operator statements, show the full spread — and they are the examples to cite when someone claims a launch date is imminent. Where regulators published only the year of a step, the duration is given as a range rather than a false-precision figure.

Two patterns fall out of those cases. First, the fastest routes are the ones where the operator licenses through a locally incorporated partner instead of fighting for a direct foreign licence. Second, protectionism is a real variable, not a conspiracy theory: incumbent operators that have sunk capital into national fibre and mobile networks routinely file objections, and regulators have openly deferred decisions while rewriting frameworks for non-geostationary systems. Emergency deployments are the one situation where regulators regularly move in days rather than months, as the disaster-response record in Starlink in Disaster Relief: Hurricane and Conflict Zone Connectivity shows.

The United States: no licensing barrier, but cell limits and subsidy politics instead

For American readers the licensing question is already settled, and that changes what to look at. SpaceX operates under FCC authorisation nationwide, including blanket earth-station authority for user terminals, so there is no state licence to wait for, no local permit for the dish itself and no domestic-partner requirement of the kind that delayed African and Asian markets. Installation rights are also protected: the FCC’s Over-the-Air Reception Devices (OTARD) rule limits how far landlords, condo boards and homeowner associations can prohibit a small antenna in an area under the resident’s exclusive control — a point worth quoting verbatim when an HOA objects.

What actually limits US availability is capacity per cell. Starlink’s address-level map marks individual cells as available, waitlisted or sold out, and the sold-out cells cluster exactly where you would expect: exurbs, lake and mountain recreation corridors, and counties where a single rural cell absorbed heavy demand. Two neighbours on the same road can get different answers, so an address check beats a state-level assumption every time.

The subsidy layer has moved even faster than the coverage layer, and it is where a lot of outdated advice still circulates:

• RDOF. Starlink was a provisional winner of about $885.5 million in the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Phase I auction (bidding concluded in 2020), but the Commission rejected the long-form application in 2022, so that support was never paid out.
• ACP. The Affordable Connectivity Program, which discounted broadband by up to $30 a month ($75 on qualifying tribal lands) and which some satellite subscribers used, stopped funding new benefits in June 2024. Any article promising an ACP discount on a satellite plan is out of date.
• BEAD. The $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment programme was originally fibre-first; a 2025 restructuring made the selection technology-neutral and lowest-cost-oriented, which opened federally funded locations to LEO satellite for the first time. For readers in unserved counties, the practical effect is that satellite may arrive as a subsidised state award rather than a retail purchase.
• State and tribal programmes. Several states run their own grant or voucher schemes with their own technology rules, so eligibility can differ across a state line even though the FCC authorisation does not.

The takeaway for US readers inverts the global one: outside the United States the blocker is almost always a licence file sitting with a national regulator, and watching your regulator’s publications tells you more about your launch date than watching launch webcasts does. Inside the United States the blocker is the number of neighbours already sharing your cell, plus whichever subsidy programme is currently accepting applications.

Future Trajectory: What’s Changing in 2026-2027

Four shifts will define the next two years, and each is traceable to a specific filing, licence or announcement rather than to speculation.

Bigger satellites, more capacity per cell

SpaceX’s second-generation Starlink system was partially authorised by the FCC on 1 December 2022 (see the Gen2 partial grant, DA-22-1272), and the company has since described next-generation spacecraft carrying roughly four times the downlink capacity of the first generation, with the largest variants dependent on Starship. Because congestion, not orbital physics, sets the speeds most users experience, added capacity per cell is the variable that moves typical throughput upward — and in the United States it is also what reopens sold-out cells. Expect the practical effect to show up as fewer evening slowdowns and shorter waitlists rather than dramatic peak-speed headlines.

Direct-to-cell

Satellites carrying cellular payloads that talk to ordinary handsets crossed from demonstration to commercial service in the United States: the FCC’s Space Bureau granted SpaceX and T-Mobile the first Supplemental Coverage from Space authorisation in late November 2024, and T-Mobile moved T-Satellite to commercial availability in July 2025, starting with messaging and expanding toward limited app data. This is a coverage product, not a broadband replacement: it fills dead zones for texts and emergency contact. Anyone expecting fixed-broadband speeds to a phone from orbit will be disappointed by the link budget, which spreads a few megabits across an entire beam rather than a household.

Laser links and reduced ground dependency

Optical inter-satellite links are now standard on new Starlink launches, letting traffic cross several satellites before reaching a gateway. That decouples coverage from gateway placement — the reason oceans, polar routes and countries without domestic gateways became servable — and it shortens long-haul routes where vacuum beats glass by about 47%. The strategic consequence is regulatory as much as technical: the more traffic lasers can carry, the fewer countries can withhold service purely by refusing a gateway.

Competitive pressure

Amazon’s deployment cadence for Kuiper/Leo, which began production launches on 28 April 2025 and is tracked through Amazon’s own announcements, is the variable to watch: a second at-scale consumer LEO network would be the first genuine price pressure Starlink has faced, and the US market — with no licensing friction and a large unserved rural base — is where that competition will land first. Eutelsat’s integration of OneWeb continues to consolidate the enterprise and mobility side. For mobile users, the fastest-moving changes are in plan structure rather than hardware, as tracked in Starlink for Digital Nomads: Portable Internet Across Borders.

The Bottom Line on LEO vs GEO

If you can get fibre, take fibre. If you cannot, and a LEO service is licensed where you live, expect latency in the 20-40 ms range and speeds that support video calls, remote work and gaming, because only 7-15 ms of that budget is the unavoidable trip to orbit and back — everything else is engineering that keeps improving. If only GEO is available, expect a connection that streams and browses adequately but cannot support real-time interaction, because roughly 477 ms of pure propagation is baked into the orbit itself and no equipment upgrade will ever remove it.

Everything else — dish generation, plan tier, provider marketing — is a detail layered on top of that single physical fact. Two other variables decide your actual experience: how many neighbours share your cell, and whether a licence exists for your country. Outside the United States, that licence file is usually the binding constraint; inside it, the cell is.

How the numbers in this guide were checked

Latency figures are computed from published orbital altitudes and the speed of light, so you can reproduce them with a calculator. Satellite counts come from independent catalogue tracking (Jonathan’s Space Report, CelesTrak) rather than operator press releases. Speed ranges come from Ookla’s measurement research combined with operator disclosures and are dated to Q3 2026, because they change every quarter. Hardware and plan prices come from the operators’ own order pages on the same date and vary by market. Licensing timelines are reconstructed from regulator announcements in each named country, and where a regulator published only the year of a step, the duration is stated as a range rather than a precise figure. US subsidy history is taken from the FCC’s own auction and programme pages and from the federal BEAD programme documentation. Where a figure is given as a range, it is because the underlying value genuinely varies by cell, market and month — not because the range is a hedge.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does satellite internet work step by step?

Your dish transmits a radio signal in the Ku or Ka band to a satellite passing overhead. The satellite either relays that signal straight down to a ground station (gateway) or forwards it across the constellation over laser inter-satellite links. The gateway hands the traffic to a fibre point of presence on the public internet, and the reply retraces the same path back to your dish. On a low-Earth-orbit system the signal covers four hops of roughly 550-1,100 km each, and the whole round trip typically completes in 20-40 milliseconds.

Why is Starlink faster than traditional satellite internet?

Two reasons, and only one of them is distance. Starlink orbits far closer to the ground, which is why a Starlink connection completes a round trip in tens of milliseconds where a geostationary one needs more than half a second. But the second reason is architectural: geostationary consumer services lean on provider-side acceleration proxies and TCP-spoofing middleboxes to hide their delay, which flatters speed tests while leaving interactive traffic sluggish. Starlink needs none of that, so what you notice is not a bigger number on a speed test but behaviour: a Zoom call without talk-over, a VPN that connects in under a second instead of several, a game that registers your input, and web pages that start rendering the moment you click. Phased-array terminals, steerable spot beams and laser links between satellites also raise the capacity available per user, so the improvement is in responsiveness and headroom together, not raw peak speed alone.

What is the difference between LEO and GEO satellites?

The practical difference is motion. A LEO satellite crosses your sky in minutes, so your terminal has to electronically re-aim and hand your session to a new satellite every few minutes, and the operator needs thousands of spacecraft plus a dense gateway or laser network to keep the link unbroken. A GEO satellite appears fixed, so the dish is aimed once at installation and never moves again, and one spacecraft serves roughly a third of the planet. That drives everything downstream: LEO hardware is more complex but needs a wide, unobstructed view of the sky; GEO hardware is simple but points at a fixed spot on the equatorial arc, which sits low on the horizon at high latitudes and effectively disappears near the poles. Lifespans differ too — LEO satellites are designed to deorbit and be replaced within a few years, while GEO spacecraft are built to operate for 15 years or more, which is why a GEO fleet cannot be quietly upgraded the way a LEO one is.

Can you get high-speed internet from a satellite?

Yes, from LEO systems. Ookla’s satellite benchmarking and operator disclosures put typical Starlink residential performance in the 25-220 Mbps download and 5-20 Mbps upload range as of Q3 2026, depending on cell congestion and time of day. GEO consumer services are far slower, generally topping out around 25 Mbps on HughesNet and 12-100 Mbps across Viasat plan tiers on the same date.

Is Starlink available in every country?

No. As of September 2026 Starlink lists service in more than 100 countries and territories, and every one of them required a separate licence from a national telecoms regulator. Nigeria was the first in Africa, taking about eight months from licence (May 2022) to live service (January 2023); Zimbabwe licensed a local partner in May 2024 after publicly warning against unlicensed terminals the previous year; India granted its GMPCS licence in mid-2025 after a multi-year process; and South Africa still had no Starlink licence in 2026 because of local equity-ownership rules. If the service is missing where you live, the blocker is almost always paperwork rather than coverage.

Is Starlink available everywhere in the United States?

Legally yes, practically not always. SpaceX holds FCC authorisation nationwide, so no state licence or personal permit is needed and subscribers are protected by the FCC’s OTARD rule, which limits how far landlords and homeowner associations can block a small dish. Availability is instead constrained cell by cell: Starlink’s own map marks some congested cells as sold out or waitlisted, usually near towns and popular recreation areas, while sparsely populated cells activate immediately. Subsidy support has also moved: Starlink’s provisional $885.5 million RDOF award was rejected in 2022, the Affordable Connectivity Program’s $30 monthly discount ended in June 2024, and the BEAD programme was restructured in 2025 to be technology-neutral, which lets LEO satellite compete for federal build-out funding it was previously shut out of.

Does weather affect satellite internet?

It does. Ku and Ka band signals are absorbed and scattered by heavy rain, wet snow and dense storm cells, an effect known as rain fade, and Ka band is the more sensitive of the two. Short outages or speed drops during intense downpours are normal; light rain and cloud rarely matter. A blocked view of the sky from trees or a roofline causes far more persistent problems than weather does.

How much does satellite internet equipment cost?

As of Q3 2026 Starlink lists its standard consumer kit at roughly $499-$599 in most markets, with regional variation, periodic promotions and occasional low-cost hardware offers tied to longer service commitments. GEO providers such as HughesNet and Viasat usually lease equipment for a monthly fee and add a professional installation charge instead. Always price the hardware, the installation and the mount together, since a non-standard mount can add a meaningful cost.