High-speed satellite Internet technology has been around for more than a decade and is a very reliable, robust and affordable technology.  And even though the process to deliver satellite broadband access to your home uses state-of-the-art rocket science, it's really quite basic:

When an Agristar subscriber enters an Internet address into their computer's Web browser, their satellite modem sends a Web page request to the satellite dish outside their home.  The radio transmitter in the dish sends this request up at the speed of light to a geostationary satellite, which immediately relays the message down to the satellite network operations center (NOC).

The NOC, which is connected to the Internet backbone via high-capacity fiber optic lines, routes the Web page request on to the Web site server, which sends Internet page data packets back to the satellite NOC.  The NOC has special acceleration technology that gathers these data packets and sends them up in a burst at the speed of light to the geostationary satellite.  (This acceleration process maximizes the delivery efficiency of the satellite network because each individual packet of information does not make an independent space segment trip, which greatly enhances the overall speed of the service.)

The satellite then instantly relays the information down to the Agristar subscriber’s satellite dish.  The dish receives the Web site data and passes it on to the modem which converts it and delivers it to the subscriber’s computer.  Incredibly, this process from start to finish takes less than a few seconds.

With high-speed satellite Internet technology, Agristar can provide any rural location in the U.S. – no matter how remote – with a direct connection to the Internet backbone.