Delivery delays can actually be much longer in television. Until recently I was employed working with the technology that provides exactly that mode of satellite communication. It's a fairly good analogue to the Manned Space Flight Network.

You certainly have light travel time to and from the satellite, and perhaps in Afghanistan's case two satellites. You also have some delays in the transponders on the satellite. But there is also substantial delay in the ground equipment at both the uplink and downlink sites. In the case of digital streams they may need to be spooled for a fraction of a second until they are injected into a satellite transport stream.

Let me explain that last sentence. In the case of digital television, each transponder handles a transport stream (a digital signal on a carrier) composed of up to about eight complete television programs (where program is loosely defined) and supporting information at bit rates close to 35 million bps. The format of this signal is rigidly defined. For packets containing video or audio, you simply cannot send them up to the satellite as soon as they are available from the encoder. They must wait until the appropriate "slot" in the transport stream is available.

Further, MPEG-2 compression and decompression (the basic standard for practially all such transmissions) requires substantial prebuffering in the decoder. It's not uncommon for broadcast-quality MPEG decoders to spool a few seconds' worth of data prior to starting the decode.

From Afghanistan the signal may have to make two satellite hops to get to Atlanta or New York. This is because there isn't any satellite that springs to mind which has both locations in line-of-sight. So an intermediate link in Europe is likely. Stream injection protocols apply at all sites. Then it must be sent back up to the distribution satellite so that your local cable company can pick it up. In the case of DirecTV and Dish Network, another satellite trip is required to get to their distribution satellite. Now the last two steps don't affect a conversation between the anchorman and his correspondent in Afghanistan.

The current MSFN/TDRS network has many of the same real-time limitations as the consumer satellite network. The Apollo MSFN used less packet-multiplexing and less digitized communication. Only the telemetry data was transmitted over the MSFN in digital format because it was already digital. Other signals such as voice were carried in analog format.

The astronaut speaking into his microphone transmitted from the VHF antenna to the EVA antenna on the LM. The LM communication equipment upconverted this to S-band an frequency and transmitted it either over its built-in steerable S-band antenna or over the erectable S-band antenna. This relay was provided by the LRV on J-missions.

The signal was received by one of several receiving stations in the MSFN and transmitted to mission control over a redundant and rather hodge-podge collection of leased telephone lines and satellites. A collation station at MCC selected the appropriate signal and fed it to MCC computers and communication switchboards. It was broadcast back out on a different S-band frequency for the benefit of the orbiting command module, which generally cannot pick up the VHF signals from the suits and cannot intercept the S-band transmission to earth.

I recommend Kranz's Failure Is Not an Option and Lindsay's Tracking Apollo to the Moon for detailed explanations.