Subscriber traffic is routed to and from the Internet (and other public networks) through a designated ground-based facility known as a gateway earth station. At these gateways, traffic is processed through a satellite modem termination system (SMTS) and other terrestrial networking equipment, which then interconnects with a terrestrial fiber optic network and, eventually, the Internet.

CONGESTION MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

ViaSat manages its network to prevent adverse impact on the customers experience. This congestion usually occurs between the customer’s location and ViaSat's ViaSat-1 satellite. This is monitored to determine if a high level of traffic exists. If so, those channels are given precedence so the subscriber applications with greater than normal sensitivity to delay is not impacted.

IMPACT OF CONGESTION ON CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

Satellite Internet has always been plagued with congestion problems. How to divide the limited amount of bandwidth between its customer base. Earlier on, most products (services) did not even bother to address congestion. That is why some services were more robust early in the morning and dreadfully slow in the evenings when most were online with their systems. Later products tried to maintain its limited capacity by employing methods that meant their customer experience was always slow. Both methods failed to take into consideration the overall impact on the customer.

Viasat plans to manage it's network to minimize qualitative impact of congestion on traffic. Pretty lofty goals but one they hope to achieve  with use of an algorithm that reduces traffic for everyone but give precedence  to applications that are more sensitive to delay.  They plan on dividing traffic into three distinct types.

TYPE 1 - VOIP, Internet Browsing (HTTP, HTTPS)

TYPE 2 - Dedicated to email, small files (generally less than 50MB

TYPE 3 - Large file transfers (excess of 50MB)