Originally Posted by mamb0

It is a mix of antenna diversity and automated tracking of the relative satellite position. During a TATL you have 4 to 5 satellite switch overs. The handshake and protocol synch takes approx one to two minutes. That's the time you can experience signal loss, other than that it really is stable and offer 5Mb/s down and 1,5Mb/s upstream (with a painful latency, yes).