is there a difference between Latency and speed ? so latency is the time it takes for bits to get from the sender to the receiver and the speed is how fast bits travel , so logically the more speed the network has the more low latency it has also , but why are people saying that Satellite connection has good speed but Horrible Latency !! can someone please explain what going on here ?

You can have _high speed_ , but if you have to go through a **long distance** then you have also _high latency_.

Let's use _Los Angeles_ and _London_ to understand this:

The distance from Los Angeles to London is around 9,000 kilometers.(The shortest path).

A geostationary satellite is 35,800 kilometers above the earth.

The satellite is roughly 4 times farther than the LA-London distance.

As radio waves go at the speed of light, which is _300,000 km per second_ , when you are communicating with a satellite the total distance (going up and down) is nearly 71,500 kilometers. The time that the radio wave takes to move from origin to destination will be around **240 ms** (milliseconds).

Using fiber optic the speed is around 2/3 of the speed of light ( _200.000 km per second_ ), and as the distance is around _9,000 kilometers_ the travel time is near **45 ms**.

Satellite is useful for one-way communication as TV, but not suitable for two-way communication as video-conference.