It's because of the altitude of the satellites. Normal geostationary satellites are required to be at 35,786 kilometers in altitude above Earth's equator. Any s

It's because of the altitude of the satellites. Normal geostationary satellites are required to be at 35,786 kilometers in altitude above Earth's equator. Any signal has to travel that distance 4 times for a round trip ping, which equates to a minimum ping time to any service of 477 ms simply defined by laws of physics. 477 ms means any online games are unplayable and loading an ssl connection is going to push you into over a second delay. Now the obvious idea is to put the satellites much closer to Earth, in that case they're rapidly moving across the surface and you need thousands/hundreds of them for full coverage, depending on the altitude the satellites are at. This wasn't really feasible until you had a rocket and satellite manufacturing designed for dumping large quantities of satellites into orbit at a time.