Unfortunately satellite internet systems are way more complicated than you probably think. It can be very hard to tell why a terminal is experiencing issues. Sometimes it's because of a nearby cell phone tower and you have to adjust some terminal configurations to shift frequencies slightly. Maybe there's just a lots of bad weather in that particular part of the country and rain fade is degrading the signal and the terminal isn't transmitting at max power like it should. Maybe your neighbor has a police radar detector in his car interfering with the signal. Maybe a horse has bumped the dish and it's slightly mispointed at the satellite now. Maybe it's an issue on the gateway side. (all true stories).

Unless it's a mass issue across a whole beam, it usually requires some investigation to figure out why an individual terminal state is degraded. And sometimes (more than I'm comfortable with) during the course of your investigation you make the terminal state even worse (because you tweaked some config parameter the wrong way). You can always tell when you done messed up because suddenly you get disconnected from your ssh session or you can no longer reach the embedded web server from your browser. In those cases sometimes the only way to recover is to precisely undo what you did, and an auto-ping-reset will not fix it (unless the system keeps track of most recent config changes or something). Your options are: use udp/tcp proxy or snmp to attempt to undo the config parameter you foobared or send out a technician and fix it on site...

I'm not saying our system is perfect. Surely we could improve fault detection and recovery. I'm just saying one-way communication protocols are real nice to have sometimes because of these scenarios.