Bandwidth is the amount of information, the line is capable of trasferring in a given amount of time. Latency is the time that it takes for information to travel from one end to another. Compare a communication line to a water pipe. The wider the pipe is, the more water can run through it - that's bandwidth . The faster the water flows through pipe, the less time it will be delayed inside it - that's latency .
Optical lines have very low latency.
Optical line latency from Israel to US is 150ms. Satellite lines are at least 4 times slower, so the typical latency will be 600-900 ms. Also note, that the average latency of a phone line, when used to connect with modem, is 250-300 ms. Therefore optical vs. satellite is one of the most important criteria. When you click a hyperlink in Netscape, it takes some time to resolve the address of the new site, to connect to it and to download the page.