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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

Rain reduces the speed and increases the latency (I'm actually not sure why the latency increases, it's not like the signal has to go further) but, it still works.

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Because it needs to repeat messages more till you get a clear message through

Not sure about that? In a UDP based ping it's fire and forget so wouldn't repeat, so would show as packet loss not increased latency.

Unless the physical layer is using more FEC and using longer "timeslots" to get to transmit the payload. But even that seems unlikely to cause major latency increases?

It's vanishingly rare for radio-based networks to actually rely on high level IP behavior for redelivery, as it's much faster to fix these issues on the single radio link than to wait for things to go round trip. The data link protocol typically has its own reliable delivery implementation that will result in multiple retries. This results in increased latency in poor network conditions. 802.11 behaves similarly.

They may be using link-layer ARQ which resends corrupted packets instead of dropping them.

Maybe the dish is connecting to farther away satellites closer to the horizon due to packet losses on the first satellite?

Does your latency measurement account for dropped packets? Rain-caused attenuation could cause more packets to be dropped, increasing latency if you measure it as an average over total packets sent, instead of just across packets that get delivered?

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