Miscellaneous wrote:So far (an hour) the performance seems very slow. We'll see how it does over time.
As others have said the main issue with satellite broadband is latency (remember those old TV interviews with the 2 second pause?)
There is a fair bit of tinkering that can sometimes be done to improve it (after you've confirmed that the dish alignment is not a problem).
One trick is increasing the maximum number of concurrent connections for the web-browser .... by default Windows only allows 6 connections at a time to a website - i.e. it fetches the main page, this might reference 50 images/scripts/etc, and it then fetches them 6 at a time ... but on a Satellite connection you lose 500 msecs between each batch of 6, so increase 6 to 30 or similar. Google 'changing ConnectionsPerHostname'
If I recall correctly, Firefox allows better control of these settings than most browsers.
Alternatively Chrome has an extension called "Data Saver" - this routes http traffic via Google servers and often merges many small files into fewer files - certainly worth trying (but note it doesn't touch https traffic, so won't speed up secure websites).
At a more technical level, it can be worth running a local caching DNS server, as using an internet hosted DNS server means each request to look-up a new domain takes 500msecs - some routers will act as a caching DNS server themselves .... others simply relay requests upstream. If you keep seeing "Resolving host..." in the status bar, it is likely that all your DNS requests are being sent back out to the internet at a 0.5s penalty each..