How satellite internet works: GEO vs LEO, latency, India

Satellite internet works by relaying data between a small antenna at your home and a ground station, called a gateway, that connects to the regular internet, with a satellite in between. How high that satellite flies decides most of what you experience. Old geostationary satellites sit 35,786 km up, so every request takes about half a second just to travel. Newer low-Earth-orbit (LEO) constellations such as Starlink fly at around 550 km, cutting that delay to a few milliseconds but requiring thousands of satellites. In India, Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb and Jio-SES hold licences but, as of early October 2026, none has launched commercial service because spectrum has not yet been assigned.

The basic path of your data

Every satellite broadband connection has four parts:

User terminal. The dish or flat panel on your roof, plus a router. It points at the satellite and sends and receives radio signals.
Satellite. It receives your signal and passes it on, either straight back down or to another satellite.
Gateway. A large ground station with bigger dishes, connected by fibre to the internet.
Point of presence. Where the operator’s network meets the wider internet, much like a normal broadband provider.

When you open a web page, your request goes up from the dish to the satellite, down to a gateway, across fibre to the website’s server, and the reply comes back the same way. The space leg is the part that makes satellite internet different.

GEO, MEO and LEO

Satellites are grouped by altitude. The European Space Agency’s orbit guide puts geostationary orbit (GEO) at 35,786 km above the equator, where a satellite circles at the same rate Earth spins and so appears fixed in the sky. Low Earth orbit (LEO) is anything below about 2,000 km. Medium Earth orbit (MEO) sits in between.

Orbit	Typical altitude	Example broadband system	Satellites needed for coverage	Dish
GEO	35,786 km	Traditional VSAT and satellite TV-style broadband	ESA: three evenly spaced satellites give near-global coverage	Fixed dish, pointed once
MEO	About 8,000 km	SES O3b mPOWER (13 satellites, per SES)	Tens	Tracking antenna
LEO	About 340–1,200 km	Starlink (~550 km), Amazon Leo (590–630 km), Eutelsat OneWeb (1,200 km)	Hundreds to thousands	Electronically steered flat panel

The trade-off is simple. A GEO satellite sees about a third of the planet and never moves relative to you, so one satellite can serve a whole country. A LEO satellite sees a much smaller patch and crosses the sky in minutes, so you need a large constellation to keep one overhead at all times. Eutelsat says its OneWeb constellation has more than 600 satellites in 12 orbital planes; Amazon’s FCC licence covers 3,236 satellites for the network now called Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper).

Why altitude decides latency

Latency is the time a request takes to go out and a reply to come back, measured in milliseconds (ms). Radio waves travel at the speed of light, about 299,792 km per second (NIST). That sets a floor no engineering can beat.

Here is the arithmetic for a satellite directly overhead, ignoring everything except distance:

GEO: up 35,786 km and down 35,786 km is about 71,600 km, or roughly 239 ms one way. A request and its reply each make that trip, so the round trip is at least about 480 ms before any processing or ground network delay. Real-world figures are higher.
MEO (8,000 km): about 16,000 km per one-way hop, roughly 53 ms, so a round-trip floor of about 107 ms.
LEO (550 km): about 1,100 km per hop, roughly 3.7 ms, so a round-trip floor of under 10 ms.

Starlink’s own technical note on latency says speed-of-light propagation from user to satellite and back down is “in the range of 1.8–3.6 ms per leg, and usually under 10 ms for the round-trip.” It reported cutting median peak-hour latency in the United States from 48.5 ms to 33 ms, and lists the other contributors: the distance from the gateway to the internet, how many users share a satellite beam, and software buffering.

This is why GEO broadband feels sluggish for video calls and gaming even when download speeds are decent, and why LEO is the technology behind the current wave of interest.

User terminals: why the dish matters

A GEO dish is pointed once and left alone. A LEO terminal has to follow satellites that rise and set within minutes and switch between them without dropping the connection. Modern LEO terminals do this with a phased-array antenna: a flat panel of many small antenna elements whose signals are timed so the beam can be steered electronically, with no moving parts.

These panels are the costly part of the hardware. Amazon has said its customer terminals range from a 7-inch model designed for up to 100 Mbps to a standard model under 11 inches square for up to 400 Mbps and a larger enterprise model for up to 1 Gbps. TRAI flagged the one-time cost of a satellite terminal in India at ₹20,000–50,000, as reported by The Wire.

Gateways and inter-satellite links

In the simplest design, called a “bent pipe”, a satellite just relays your signal down to a gateway that is also within its view. That means an operator needs gateways spread across every region it serves, connected to good fibre.

Some constellations add inter-satellite links: laser connections that pass data from satellite to satellite in space before bringing it down. Starlink’s note describes laser links as “essential for connecting the most remote locations on Earth and for routing around congestion,” while noting that routing over lasers can add latency compared with going straight to the ground. Lasers matter for oceans, polar regions and aircraft, where no gateway is nearby.

In India, gateways are also a security requirement, as explained below: traffic from Indian users must land at gateways inside India.

Capacity: the limit nobody advertises

Each satellite has a fixed amount of radio spectrum and power, which it divides among several beams. Everyone inside a beam’s footprint shares that beam’s capacity. This has three consequences:

Density hurts. A satellite beam covering a crowded city is shared by many more homes than one over a remote valley. That is why satellite broadband is generally best suited to sparse areas.
Peak hours matter. Starlink measures latency specifically at 6–9 pm local time “when the network is under the most load”, per its note.
More satellites, more capacity. Operators add capacity by launching more satellites and using more spectrum, which is one reason constellations keep growing and why spectrum policy matters so much.

Fibre does not have this problem in the same way: a single fibre strand can carry far more data than a satellite beam, and capacity can be added by lighting more fibre.

What drives price

Satellite broadband is expensive to build: rockets, satellites that need replacing every few years, gateways, terminals and spectrum fees. TRAI’s May 2025 recommendations note that LEO satellites generally have a useful life of five to seven years, so constellations need continuous replacement.

For an Indian household, the cost has two parts: the terminal (the ₹20,000–50,000 range TRAI cited) and a monthly plan. As of early October 2026 no operator has launched commercial consumer service in India, so there are no confirmed retail plan prices. Treat any figure you see as speculation until an operator publishes it.

Where India’s rules stand (October 2026)

India’s path has several separate gates. Here is where each stood at the time of writing:

Service licence (DoT). Satellite operators need a GMPCS (Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellite) licence. Starlink received its licence in June 2025; Eutelsat OneWeb and Jio-SES also hold the necessary licences, according to MediaNama.
Space authorisation (IN-SPACe). IN-SPACe, the space regulator, authorised Starlink’s first-generation constellation of 4,408 satellites in July 2025, valid until July 2030. It rejected an earlier application for Starlink’s second-generation system; Starlink reapplied in August 2026 for nearly 30,000 satellites, including direct-to-phone capability, as reported by The Wire and MediaNama.
Spectrum method. The Telecommunications Act, 2023 lists satellite services in its First Schedule, which means spectrum is assigned administratively — at a price set by the government — rather than by auction, as TRAI’s recommendations set out. Jio had argued for an auction.
Spectrum price and terms. TRAI recommended in May 2025 a charge of 4% of adjusted gross revenue (AGR), a ₹500 per subscriber per year levy for LEO operators in urban areas, and assignment for up to five years with a possible two-year extension. In September 2026, the Digital Communications Commission, DoT’s top decision-making body, approved most of this but set the charge at 5% of AGR, reduced to 4% for rural and remote operations, and rejected the ₹500 urban levy as impractical, according to The Wire and Advanced Television. The decision still needs Union Cabinet approval.
Security clearance. Licensees must then show their systems meet DoT security conditions issued in May 2025. These include gateways and a network control centre in India, no Indian user traffic routed through foreign gateways, lawful interception, blocking of sites already blocked in India, geo-fencing near borders, and a plan to indigenise at least 20% of the ground segment, according to MediaNama. MediaNama also reported that Starlink’s final clearances were frozen in June 2026 over national-security concerns, which Starlink disputed.

The short version: licences exist, but until spectrum is formally assigned and security checks are completed, no one can switch on commercial service. If you care about how data rules apply more broadly, our explainer on India’s DPDP Act covers the separate personal-data law.

Who satellite internet is for

	Fibre broadband	5G (mobile or fixed wireless)	LEO satellite	GEO satellite
Typical latency	Lowest	Low	Low (tens of ms)	High (around half a second or more)
Capacity per area	Very high	High where towers are dense	Limited, shared per beam	Limited, shared per beam
Where it works	Where cables reach	Where towers reach	Almost anywhere with sky view	Almost anywhere with sky view toward the equator
Setup	Line installation	SIM or router	Terminal on roof	Dish on roof
Best use	Homes and offices in towns and cities	Mobile users, homes near towers	Remote villages, ships, aircraft, disaster backup, sites far from fibre	Broadcast, backhaul, latency-tolerant links

For most urban Indian homes with fibre or good 5G, satellite broadband is unlikely to be the cheaper or faster option. Its strength is reach: hill villages, islands, border posts, ships, aircraft and places where laying cable makes no sense, plus as a backup when cables are cut. TRAI’s own recommendations frame rural and remote coverage as the main public-interest case.

The next frontier is direct-to-device service, where an ordinary phone talks to a satellite without a dish. That raises separate spectrum questions TRAI is still working through; it also overlaps with how phones handle network profiles, which our eSIM explainer covers. Many of the chips inside these terminals are also part of the design work India’s semiconductor mission is funding.

The point: Satellite internet is a trade between altitude and scale. LEO constellations fix the latency problem that made old satellite broadband frustrating, but each beam’s capacity is shared, so they suit remote areas far better than crowded cities. In India the technology is ready and the licences exist; what is missing, as of October 2026, is Cabinet sign-off on spectrum and completed security clearances.