Starlink or Viasat? Here's how they compare

Introduction: low-earth orbit versus geostationary

Starlink and Viasat both beam internet to a dish on your home, but they do it from wildly different altitudes, and that is the whole story. Viasat runs a small number of powerful geostationary satellites parked about 22,000 miles above the equator. Starlink runs thousands of small satellites in low-earth orbit, roughly 340 miles up. The shorter distance is why Starlink feels like ordinary broadband for video calls and gaming, while Viasat carries the high latency that has always defined traditional satellite.

Technology: why orbit decides everything

Viasat’s geostationary satellites sit far enough away to cover a huge area from a fixed point, which keeps the network simple and coverage broad. The cost is distance: every packet travels tens of thousands of miles round trip, adding 590–800 ms of latency regardless of how fast the plan is. That delay is what makes a Viasat connection stutter on video calls and rules out most real-time gaming.

Speed comparison

Viasat’s plans advertise up to 150 Mbps, and thanks to Viasat-3 capacity many users now see real-world speeds in the 25–100 Mbps range during off-peak hours — a solid step up from older Viasat generations. Uploads remain slow, generally 3–6 Mbps.

Starlink’s residential tiers deliver up to 100, 200, or 400+ Mbps with uploads around 20–50 Mbps, and most users land in the 50–250 Mbps range. Even Starlink’s entry plan is competitive with Viasat’s ceiling, and its higher tiers pull well ahead. For a busy household streaming and working at the same time, Starlink’s extra headroom — and much faster uploads — is a real difference.

Latency: the critical difference

If you take one thing from this comparison, make it latency. Viasat’s 590–800 ms means a noticeable lag between clicking and seeing a response — painful for video calls, cloud apps, and anything interactive. Starlink’s 25–60 ms is low enough that most people cannot tell they are on satellite during a Zoom call or a Netflix session, and casual online gaming works. No amount of Viasat speed closes this gap, because it is a function of orbit, not bandwidth. This is the main reason Starlink dominates when performance is the priority.

Weather performance and reliability

All satellite internet is more weather-sensitive than a buried cable, but Starlink and Viasat degrade differently because of their orbits — and the honest summary is that both can struggle in heavy weather, just in different ways. Viasat’s geostationary signal travels a far longer path through the atmosphere, which makes it more prone to “rain fade,” where heavy precipitation absorbs or scatters the signal. In intense thunderstorms, Viasat users can see outages lasting anywhere from several minutes to the better part of an hour; light to moderate rain more often causes a speed dip than a full drop. Viasat’s dish has no heater, so snow accumulation has to be cleared manually or with a third-party solution.

Starlink’s low-earth-orbit signal covers a much shorter distance, so it tends to ride out weather better, though it is not immune — expect brief interruptions (often just seconds) during the heaviest downpours and occasional longer hits in severe wet-snow storms. The dish is built for the elements: it carries an IP67 weatherproof rating, includes a self-heating mode that melts snow at rates up to roughly 1.5 inches per hour (drawing an extra ~75 watts when active), and is rated to keep operating in winds of 60+ mph. In day-to-day terms, a Starlink user in a rainy or snowy climate will generally see fewer and shorter weather outages than a Viasat user at the same address.

Neither service promises the near-perfect uptime of fiber, so if you run something truly outage-sensitive — medical monitoring, a security system, or a business that cannot go dark — plan for a cellular or wired backup alongside whichever satellite service you choose.

Coverage, waitlists, and the road ahead

Both cover essentially the whole country. Viasat can activate at almost any address with a clear southern sky view and no waitlist, and its available speeds and pricing vary by how crowded your beam is. Starlink also reaches nearly every U.S. address, with occasional short waitlists in a few high-demand cells that keep shrinking as SpaceX launches more satellites. Looking ahead, Starlink’s 2026 V3 rollout should add roughly ten times the capacity, while Viasat continues to lean on its Viasat-3 fleet. To see the full category side by side, visit our satellite provider hub, or compare HughesNet vs Starlink if HughesNet is also on your list.