I wrote recently about Hughes Satellite's new pricing options that make it very attractive in rural areas where landline broadband may not be available. Hughes is also working on new technology that will provide much better quality of service for satellite broadband and will improve some of the latency (delay) issues that have been an issue in the past.
Hughes is putting a new satellite up soon that will have routing capabilities on the satellite itself. This is a dramatic and important change from the past, where the satellite has been a passive conduit and simply passed data packets from one earth station to another.
The new approach will have each packet examined on the satellite, and it is destined for another Hughes customer, it will be directed straight to that customer, rather than being sent up and down. For some traffic, this could cut transit time by 50% or more--a huge boost when talking about network latency. This will be especially popular for businesses managing several locations that use Hughes services, as Hughes can create a private network with much higher performance.
Innovations like these are making satellite increasingly attractive for rural areas. And with improved performance, satellite may have an important long term role to play in providing network redundancy.