Direcway, I believe, is the latest name in the name-changing game for DirecTV's service.
Owned by Hughes, it's been around for a bit, and I've at least one data-point from a friend that used the service when he was in the boonies, and couldn't get cable or DSL service. Drew already touched on one of the issues: upload speed. There are others, as we shall soon see --
1) Upload speed. Depending on where you are situated, you can either opt for a dial-in upload connection, or there is now a direct-to-satellite uplink kit. In either case, the issues of upload speed and latency (two different things) tend to interact, depending on how your complete round-trip path ends up.
2) Bandwidth (both up and down). Hughes (and I imagine some other satellite services, as well), actually throttle your download bandwidth, to keep you from 'hogging' the available skimpy bandwidth, especially if you are considered an 'abuser' of the service (nothing like trying to use your 'unlimited' privileges on various ISP's to get you labled an 'abuser', don't you know
). The way it worked for my friend was that you got pretty good download bandwidth until you had exceeded some limitation (which, if I recall, was pretty low considering it was supposed to be a broandband service), and then you were throttled back to 128 kbps (about twice dial-up speed) for the remainder of your service month (in 'bandwidth jail' so to speak), before you could get high-speed service again. As far as upload bandwidth goes, he only had dial-up for uploads, so we never got a chance to see how good it might really be, but I suspect that upload bandwidth throttles would also apply to those with direct-to-satellite transmitters.
3) Latency (round-trip/one-way). The ugly secret of geosync satellite links is that they must obey (at least for the forseeable future) that pesky speed-of-light law. That means that for every trip from the Earth's surface to a geo-sync satellite which is about 40,000 mi slant-distance from about 40N latitude, you can add about 1/3 of a second transmission delay. If you use a direct-to-satellite uplink, there are a total of four of these hops in a round-trip packet, from where you hit a key (or click the mouse on a link) and the first response comes back. This might seem minor, but if you are typing into an interactive form of some sort (using telnet sessions to remotely login to something) the delay will drive you batty. It also ruins any kind of on-line game play. The other players will be able to whip you in seconds flat. In any event, it tends to slow down all interactions, especially ones that require a bunch of small hand-shaking packets back and forth between your machine and the remote site.
So, is satellite for you? I'm resigned to the fact that if ever decide to go full-time RVing, that it will be the only game in town. Maybe more competition in the future will make the situation more tenable, but for now, if you have just about any other option that can get you the bandwidth you need, you should check into it.
Finally, some of the new metro high-bandwidth services are starting to come into place, but so far, they really are only aimed at mobile users operating in large population areas (otherwise it's too expensive to get good coverage so far, with the small installed base), and at least Verizon has already made a bad name for themselves for kicking folks off their system for 'abusing' the 'unlimited' bandwidth they prominently advertise. Check out Where's Ben? and I: Cringely for recent articles about Verizon's tactics. It seems that there is a 5 gigabyte/month limit (unadvertised), and if you exceed that, you get a warning, and then a disconnecton notice. At no time do they explain what the limitation is, just that you've exceeded it, and that if you don't behave, they will terminate you. Ben was terminated, in spite of efforts on his part to find out what terrible crime he had committed, and had to scramble to find other means of connecting from his RV.
Good luck in your hunt for connectively, and let us know what you ultimately ended up with.
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