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ViaSat appear to be getting round the problem of request/responses taking ~ 0.5 second on geostationary satellite links (and hence leading to long delays to complete loading of web pages) by aggregating the multiple request/reponses for the web objects in a page. However this will not assist for real time applications such as quick action first person shooter gaming or haptic surgery or Voice over IP. For VoIP the concern is the RTT delays of 500ms for geostationary satellite plus any delays between the ground stations and the conversants, plus de-jitter buffer etc. exceeds the recommended specifications for VoIP (see for example http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/QoS and ITU-T G.114). In particular long delays result in difficulty for the conversants to know when the speaker is done.
Their ViaStat's focus is currently on the aviation, military, business, and consumer sectors in the Americas, Europe and East Asia and not on the addressing the other 3 billion with no Internet access in regions such as Africa. Besides having fixed based terminals, they also have portable satellite terminals <http://www.satcomresources.com/Viasat-Exede-Pro-Portable-Satellite-Terminal> . Until ViaSat-2 is launched, they have limited Inflight Wi-Fi on "JetBlue and some United Airlines commercial planes <http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/aug/06/viasat-spacex-jet-blue-united-airlines-amazon/>". ViaSat-1 launched in late 2011 supports 140Gbps of capacity. In 2016 they are launching ViaSat-2 offering between 250 and 300 Gbps, and in 2020-2021 they plan to launch ViaSat-3 in the terabit range. The first market ViaSat 3 will address is the Americas, building on the presence of ViaSat 1 and 2 while plunging significantly further into areas like Latin America. The second ViaSat 3 satellite is to focus on Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and the third on the Asia Pacific.
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