...
Already, traditional players like Intelsat, the world’s largest satellite company by market capitalization, is using the capabilities of its next-generation geostationary satellites to deliver Internet connectivity to airplanes, cruise ships, the world’s merchant marine fleet, all markets that “basically didn’t exist five to seven years ago,” says David McGlade, CEO of Intelsat.
New Protocols
ViaStat 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 gaming or Voice over IP.
Overall Summary
Satellites can last decades, but balloons and drones must be constantly replenished, and many more are needed to cover the Earth.
...