It is well known that inefficiencies occur in the operation of TCP when the bandwidth delay product of the network is large compared to its buffering capacity. A central reason for that is a cyclic behavior of the protocol in which two consecutive slow-start phases appear in each cycle [5,1]. This results in low throughput and under-utilization of the available bandwidth. We show in this paper that, for an even larger ratio between the bandwidth-delay product and the buffer size, which is typical for satellite links, a new regime of three consecutive slow-start phases occurs. We need to refine previously studied models in order to explain this phenomeno- n. We analyze in this paper this phenomenon, predict when it occurs and evaluate the corresponding average throughput of the connection.