Satellite computer internet is pretty limited and only useful if your need for broadband is downloading large files. For web surfing there's a small benefit, and for interactive uses like gaming and voip it's absolutely useless, because of the latency inherent to a satellite system. For the price they charge for it, it's no surprise that there are relatively few people using it.
Best bet for really rural areas, espicially flat rural areas, is to find if there's a company doing fixed wireless internet service, or convince one of the local ISP companies to start providing it.
The latency is definately a killer for gaming, but it's not bad for most other uses. Compared to DSL, it's slower, but even for web surfing, it's much faster than dialup.
I evaluated some commercial sat offerings a few years ago for disaster recovery purposes (put a dish, indoor unit, VPN encryptor, router, and a switch on a pallet to be shipped to a site or have the hardware sitting at your most important sites beforehand). It works fine except for truly latency sensitive apps. Many of those can be rewritten to deal with the latency (the vpn we used at the time was appropriately modified). There are other systems to reduce the effect of latency, but they can't solve the speed of light issue.
Unfortunately, these were all commercial offerings targeted to industry and govt. IIRC, the cheapest price for a single site was several hundred a month for an "always on" connection (meaning it was available 24/7, not necessarily transmitting).
BTW, for those that live out of reach of DSL, have you considered getting a T1 and sharing it with your neighbors via wireless? I've known people who did this in the pre-broadband days (not using wireless though). You can stretch the reach of 802.11 with repeaters, larger antennas, etc.
Or, if you have multiple phone lines, Win2k and WinXP can dial multiple modems and tie them together, doubling your bandwidth. However, some ISPs won't allow you to log in multiple times, or charge extra when you do.
Chris
