There are only a couple satellite Internet service providers out there. And with good reason. It’s an expensive endeavor. We don’t know how much money it takes to launch a satellite, maintain it and equip it with the technology necessary to stream data from earth, into the sky, then back to earth. But we’re guessing it’s quite an undertaking.

One company touts bandwidth “speeds” up to 25Mbps. The other, “speeds” up to 100Mbps. Very impressive considering how far your data has to travel to get from your business to its destination. We use quotes around speeds because, if you’ve followed our blog, you know that’s a little misleading.

Bandwidth, as we’ve pointed out, is very important. But it has more to do with the amount of data you can transmit, and much less with the speed with which it travels. That would be a latency issue.

We perused both provider websites and found many references to bandwidth “speed.” We couldn’t find a single reference to latency. We don’t have any clients using a satellite Internet service provider, so we have no data on their actual latency. But all indications are, it’s not acceptable.

It seems Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, gets it. SpaceX has announced that they are getting into the satellite Internet service provider business this year. It’ll take some time to reach the entire country and around the globe, but it looks like the plan is to launch over 4,000 satellites to get the job done.

The plan for SpaceX is to use satellites in what they call Low Earth Orbit (LEO).

SpaceX announced “once fully optimized through the Final Deployment, the system will be able to provide high bandwidth (up to 1Gbps per user), low-latency broadband services for consumers and businesses in the US and globally.”

We’ve read that latency will be as low as 25ms. Now, 25ms may not be ideal if you’re paying for fiber, but when your data is bouncing off a satellite, it’s fantastic. More importantly, the fact that SpaceX gets the importance of low latency, and is making it as much of a priority as bandwidth, leads us to believe they may be on to something.

We’re impressed that SpaceX even mentioned latency when talking about their service when other service providers, whether cable, fiber or satellite rarely, if ever, talk about it.

Existing satellite ISPs perform a great service to homes and businesses around the country. There are many areas where it just isn’t practical to provide a cable or fiber service. And 25Mbps with high latency is still better than no access to the Internet. But it’s encouraging that the next player in the satellite ISP business recognizes the importance of latency when it comes to Internet “speed.”