Simple speed isn't the only factor. I don't fully understand it, but satellite technology didn't allow for a gaming experience as well as ground-based broadband. It was something to do with the transmission being in bursts, or something. Basically, browsing and streaming were fine because of how the data was handled, but realtime back and forth like an MMO was clunky. This was a little over five years ago or so, but, if I was in a hotel with satellite, the game would lag and rubberband a lot. I will say it worked better than WoW, which was nearly unplayable.
I'll try to explain that. When you send data, you always do so over bursts, but the bursts are relatively close together, so it's a constant 'stream', for all intents and purposes.
If the transmission bursts are farther apart, then there are 'gaps' in that information. Now, if you're downloading something, it doesn't matter so much if the download starts and stops like that, if the overall AVERAGE speed is the same. You, the user, won't be able to tell. Even a 'streaming' movie downloads parts of the movie before you get to it, so if the AVERAGE speed is alright, then you won't run into parts of the movie you haven't seen yet, because you view the movie at a static rate of 1 second per 1 second. So while you're watching the movie, the movie can have more of itself loaded and ready to watch faster than you can watch it. So it doesn't matter so much if there's small dead times as long as the live times are fast enough to make up the difference.
If that even makes sense?
But if you're playing a game, if the 'dead times' are long enough, it can cause lag, even if the 'live' times are sufficiently fast or even more so.
Older wireless cards had this problem a lot, and I don't even mean like, over a cell phone or anything. Even if the average speed was good, or even way better than the game required, it didn't matter so much because the game can't preload a lot of data if it constantly has to check to see if you've made a move or not.
I'm not sure though how well the technology has improved though because I don't own a smart phone. I know wireless cards and adaptors and stuff are now not that bad, as long as you have a house that is small enough and not filled up with enough things to disrupt the signal.
Of course, my information is technically second hand. I wasn't playing either game, at the time, but two of the guys I traveled with were playing WoW and one was playing CoH.
What VV has sounds a bit like a large scale point-to-point wireless system, like one of the ISPs here uses. I don't know where she is, in terms of terrain, but, if I had to guess, she's probably not in as hilly a place as I am, so her ISP is probably pretty reliable. 
A lot of places in the country don't offer broadband connections, or they do but the term for what is and isn't broadband is so old as to almost be meaningless anymore. I could see some connection in the middle of Tennessee not keeping up with most games. Especially particularly 'twitch' based game play.
