Vendor lineage
Hughes - the network where latency is a law of physics
Geostationary satellite: about a quarter of a second each way, and nothing will fix it.
Hughes Network Systems builds satellite networking, historically over geostationary satellites - and geostationary orbit imposes a constraint no engineering can remove. The orbit sits roughly 36,000 kilometres up, so a signal travels 72,000 kilometres for a round trip before anything is processed.
That produces a latency floor of around half a second, and it changes which protocols work. TCP's throughput depends on the round-trip time, so a connection with satellite latency and an ordinary window size cannot fill the link no matter how much bandwidth is provisioned - which is why satellite deployments have always needed acceleration, protocol spoofing, and application designs that tolerate delay.
It is the clearest case in networking of a limit that is not an engineering trade-off. Bandwidth can be bought and hardware can be upgraded; the speed of light and the height of the orbit are fixed, and every design decision above them is a response to that fact.