I’m thinking of getting one of the satellite tv services, but if I do that I also need to find a replacement for my broadband. Has anyone used a satellite broadband?
I have had satellite TV for many years, and also had satellite broadband for a year.
Satellite TV is very nice and compares favorably with cable TV for quality, variety, and price, in my area.
Satellite broadband (which is an entirely separate system even though both were from Hughs and advertise each other) is as dumb as toast. It was a huge effort to keep it going. I had to regularly explore various satellite internet discussion forums as well as keep calling their tech support. It would go down very frequently, and usually the problem was something I couldn’t fix but still had to get involved in. It was slow. The best I got was about 0.1 MB/s, on large file transfers. Its unusually long round trip time means that it can’t be used for various things - for example, my bank’s website did some sort of rapid back-and-forth as part of their security system, and therefore the website would time out in about 10 seconds or so, which made electronic bill payment a very amusing challenge. I spent $1500 to install the equipment (partly because of the difficult access of the only place I could see the satellite), and when their whole system died just after the warranty expired, I actually smashed their equipment up with a sledgehammer.
My advice is that if you can do anything else, don’t even try it. Dialup wins hands down in terms of overall return on effort and expense.
I explored cable, DSL, wireless, cellular, leased phone lines, HAM packet radio, and everything else I could think of, but had to go back to dialup (which in my area was limited to 2400 baud because of poor quality land lines). And that was a relief.
Wildblue. Been pretty good for us. 2 computers on at the same time mostly.
We have the Expensive pkg. $86 or so. If just one computer, the cheap option is fine. It does have latency but I bank online just fine. Looked at Hughs setup that other people had and did not like it.
YMMV
Another vote for WildBlue. I use it for work because it had full VPN support, the only one at this time AFAIK.
Your base ping time for online gaming will be about 2500 so don’t even consider it.
Transfer speeds are usually closer to advertised than I’ve heard reported for cable and DSL.
The biggest issue I’ve experienced is outage due to cloud cover and it takes a pretty dense covering to be a problem.
All that being said I will jump to cable or DSL when they become available in my area. I would like to get into some online gaming.
We used DirecPC in our office for a year. It took two person months of tweaking to get it working acceptably. Even then, certain protocols were utterly unreliable. It was a pain in the ass, and only just barely better than sharing dial-up between 12 people.
What Projammer said. 
Projammer: SW Arkansas? Have I seen you on Wildblue uncensored?
Khadaji
I’ve been on satellite for the last 4 years with two different companies. Like the other posters have mentioned, don’t even think of on-line gaming as the latency is too bad. My present provider is Orbit and I had to order a TV package to get the Internet coverage. Orbit has been fairly decent. They do tend to throttle me when I get too busy downloading large files and a download manager is advisable. Aside from that, I’ve had a good experience with them.
The previous satellite provider was a local company and they were an on-going PITA. Constant service calls, unreliable equipment, etc.
Regards
Testy
Wasn’t me. I’d never heard of the forum before your question and link. Sorry.
I will add that I had used DirecPC since it’s inception without any trouble up until I got the job where I had to have VPN.