http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2015-01-22/global-inter...
Takeaway is that with a grid of many, many satellites in low earth orbit, you can have fiber-like performance.
In short, it's complicated, much more complicated than I can see any of the articles discussing, which is why I raise the question. All the articles ever talk about is speeds, which is worrying.
[0] You need LEO to get low surface-to-satellite latency, but then each satellite can only see a comparatively small part of the Earth's surface, so you need more hops to get the packet(s) to the right satellite. I remember working on a system where the engineers helpfully(?) doubled our radio range, effectively halving our system-wide throughput. It's experiences like that that make me worry about these things.