I have Starband. Normally get 85kB/sec or about a megabit/sec on the download, but about 30-50kB/sec on the upload. The ping times are long because of the satellite hops. Would I rather have DSL? Maybe. Better than dialup? No question.
Would I switch to Wildblue? Only if there was a meaningful increase in bandwidth. Starband runs a "winmodem", where the satellite portion of the service must run in conjunction with their proprietary software on a Windows machine. I just dedicated a junker 233mhz motherboard to the task and run WinProxy. WildBlue uses a hardware box that runs everthing. The Starband winmodem is of course vulnerable to any Windows attack and since it has an IP address visible to the outside it invites hackers to try putting zombies on it.
Any satellite service will degrade or be cut off during heavy rain or snow fall. It all depends on droplet size and density. But the link rarely goes down for more than a very few hours. When your phone line goes down, it can go down for much longer.
DSL won't work at distances greater than 18,000 feet from the switching office. That's 18,000 of wire length not as the crow flies. It's not an option for rural areas.
It wouldn't be a maybe if you had it. I just checked my download speed by downloading a 4mb spyware checker from download.com. 476kbs was my download speed. That and I typically have sub 50ms pings for the online games I play.