Having very high packet loss means something is badly wrong. A good wire-level (yes I know, there are no wires, nevertheless) protocol aims to hit lower packet loss rates by fiddling with other parameters. Example: Let's say you have 40MHz of assigned frequencies, but when both ends measure they find 4MHz of that is full of noisy crap, the rest is fairly quiet. Well, rather than lose bits in those 4MHz and toss away many packets, why not keep 36MHz with a much lower error? If only 6000 packets per second get through of 10 000 sent, then an option to send 9000 and receive 8000 of them is already a win.
Now, upgrading satellites is trickier and more expensive than upgrading your home cable box, at the extreme obviously sending a bloke up to "swap out this board for a newer one" is either tremendously difficult or outright impossible depending on the orbital characteristics. But we shouldn't act as though high packet loss rates at the IP layer are to be expected, they are avoidable. And fixing them will do a lot more than just enable HTTPS to work better.
>But we shouldn't act as though high packet loss rates at the IP layer are to be expected, they are avoidable. And fixing them will do a lot more than just enable HTTPS to work better.
At that distance the very physical latency limit is almost a second. You can literally not go below. The high latency will have a lot of protocols simply time out or consider the packet lost.
At that distance you need some well engineered ground equipment to handle the signal losses. A dish and a high powered transmitter that need to be within a degree of the target. If you're off by a degree you're likely going to hit very bad packet loss. A degree is not much and you could be cause by the ground below stretching and twisting over the day due to temperature changes. TV doesn't have to deal with sending data up the link other than using the massively more powerful and expensive dishes from TV networks.
Lastly, from ground to geostationary orbit you may find that your 40MHz band is full of crap. Not because someone else is sending but because you're sending through a solid belt of radiation and magnetic flux. You'll find that for a wide range of bands they either suck at penetrating the atmosphere, penetrating the magnetic field or get sucked up by interference from half the universe.
The layers above IP have ways to handle packet loss for a reason (although the reason was bad copper cables and bad MAC). Also, the MAC is another problem; you're not the only one who wants to use the very limited resources of the sat. One of the most common and effective forms of bandwidth limiting is dropping packets and it's normal. Packets drop all the time, every TCP connection drops packets. It happens and almost all protocols deal with it on one level or another.
Now, upgrading satellites is trickier and more expensive than upgrading your home cable box, at the extreme obviously sending a bloke up to "swap out this board for a newer one" is either tremendously difficult or outright impossible depending on the orbital characteristics. But we shouldn't act as though high packet loss rates at the IP layer are to be expected, they are avoidable. And fixing them will do a lot more than just enable HTTPS to work better.