FYI:
Internet via satellite does offer some nice features, but make sure you know the laws of physics first. The pipe can be big, but the route is 10 times longer or more. Lets draw out and exsample. Lets say you live in Montana in a "cow field." You use a modem and you are trying to view web pages from here. You have the latency from the modem converting the data stream from digital to analong and slowly putting in down the phone line to your ISP. Then from there routers will descide the quickest path to take to hit
www.subaru-svx.net and the data will then find its way back to via this route. If you ping this server you will probably find 250 to 350 milisecond time. Now the down side to your modem is sustained data rate.
Now lets look at the same situation, but using a satellite. The pipe is much larger now. You have gone from a 56K to lets say 256K (average DSL speed). But as you make your request to the server here, you might wonder why you modem was faster. The request is now sent out with very little latency due to the signal remains digital. But, it has to now take a speed of light trip up 10 thousand miles to a satellite then another 10 thousand back to earth to the ISP center. Lets say it is in California. Then the signal gets to hit the router at this point and will make its trip up to Idaho for the request and back up 10 thousand miles and back down another 10 thousand miles to your house. This will take anywhere from 600 miliseconds to well over 3 seconds. Becuase viewing web pages with mostly text data on them, your modem will beat a satellite hands down just about every time. The only time it would shine brightly is large file downloads (like mp3s and such) and possibly web pages with WAY too many graphics on it.
Now dont get me wrong. I am not trying to shoot down the service. We will probably be getting one in dads RV for use at the race track this year as an only alternative. I am only speaking from experiance and want people the know the latency issues involved with such a set up.
Chris