When satellite is all you have: watching the internet from 550 ms

Satellite Communication (SatCom) offers internet connectivity where traditional infrastructures are too expensive to deploy. When using satellites in a geostationary orbit, the distance from Earth forces a round trip time higher than 550 ms. Coupled with the limited and shared capacity of the physical link, this poses a challenge to the traditional internet access quality we are used to. In this paper, we present the first passive characterization of the traffic carried by an operational SatCom network. With this unique vantage point, we observe the performance of the SatCom technology, as well as the usage habits of subscribers in different countries in Europe and Africa. We highlight the implications of such technology on Internet usage and functioning, and we pin-point technical challenges due to the CDN and DNS resolution issues, while discussing possible optimizations that the ISP could implement to improve the service offered to SatCom subscribers.