I was surprised to learn recently that GPS can be turned off by the government. I guess it makes sense, I just never thought of gps as inherently controlled by the government.
One of the largest reasons that we don't have highspeed wireless internet from satellites is that the spectrum is on the lower end of the US gov's use for old marine gps systems. It may interfere so they block the projects.
For reference, round trip time to geostationary orbit is 240 ms. But that is 36 thousand km. Compare that to the ISS which orbits less than 500 km up, so the round trip time is less than 1.25 ms.
