This paper evaluates the performance of VSAT-based satellite wide area networks.Very small aperture terminals are used as gateways to interconnect local area networks through satellite to form a wide area network. This paper concentrates on analyzing the delay of the network which is the time needed to send a packet from a station in the source LAN to a station in the destination LAN. Several access protocols are considered for comparison. It is observed through numerical examples that TDMA on the uplink and TDM broadcast on the downlink offers the best delay performance.