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Other posters have referenced the delay issue, which will prohibit VoIP and some interactive games.

Another thing that often happens with the satellite software drivers is that you cannot run VPN - if you need to run VPN drivers to connect to a corporate network (eg), then you might be out of luck with a satellite link.

One other thing that others have not mentioned is that all three of the major satellite carriers (Hughes, Gilat and WildBlue) is that they have per-week or per-month usage quotas, and when you exceed these quotas, your speed is restricted (sometimes severely) for as long as it takes to get the moving average bandwidth back below the throttling threshold.

For Gilat (formerly “Starband”), the quota used to be about 780MB over a seven day rolling period; ie, if you used more than 976MB of download b/w in the last seven days, they’d throttle you. For you to get unthrottled, you’d have to use as little bandwidth as possible so that within the most recent seven days, you’d use some lower limit - like less than 500MB.

The trouble with the throttling is that their DNS server starts to drop your packets when you’re throttled, so you cannot resolve named and you have to keep hitting the “reload” button on your browser.

Oh - one more thing about satellite ISP’s: During the spring and fall equinox periods, you lose satellite connectivity as the sun lines up behind the bird for about 90 minutes for about 3 to 7 days during these periods.

During the spring and fall equinox periods, you lose satellite connectivity as the sun lines up behind the bird for about 90 minutes for about 3 to 7 days during these periods.

Wow, learn something new every day. I think Hughesnet is a 24 hour quota. I've only exceeded it once with help from some teenagers. Once they throttled my connection it was basically unusable. I could get a tiny web page or two, but could not do IMAP or SMTP to get or send email.