My friend has HughesNet and I find it to be the most frustrating thing on earth next to dial-up. 600K my butt. If you test the connection on speedtest.net, the latency counter only has 3 digits and it always shows the latency times as 999 so who knows what it really is. Geo orbit is like what 26,000 miles or so, speed of light 186,282 mph, so .14 seconds or so to go up and the same down, everything else involving latency times is just switching equipment and ground hops. No need to bend space-time to improve latency though, just upgrade to better, faster equipment.
The satellite service I was frustrated with was hughes.net.