“Something else I forgot to mention: whenever it gets light outside is when the internet gets slower. At 3am when I get up for work, I can do pretty much whatever I want. Browsing is fast as hell then.”
When you use satellite, you send data over the phone line and receive data from the satellite. The setup guarantees latency issues. When you down load a file, you upload basically one request and the system sets up one download. When you load a web page, you can have dozens or even hundreds of uploaded requests and scheduled downloads from the satellite each adding its own latency issues.
On top of everything else, you are competing for satellite time with every other subscriber to the system. If there is a 15 second scheduling delay, you may not notice it with one big download. If a web page has to deal with a dozen 15 seconds delays, suddenly you have an unusable system.
I live out in the sticks, our initial options were satellite and POTS. Now we have 3 different wireless high speed options. You may have other options now.
But you still upload an acknowledgment for each packet you receive.