[Egon]

Dankberg said the satellite could handle Internet traffic in both directions, so customers could send, or upload, data at speeds comparable to cable and DSL. Some satellite systems send data in one direction only, meaning customers need a regular - and slow - dial-up modem for uploading.

I had satellite for about four years because of my location. It's head and shoulders above dial-up.

It will never be comparable to DSL or Cable (or even rural wireless, which is another alternative they failed to mention) because of one thing: Latency

Latency keeps you from doing (or hinders greatly) stuff like:

• Online Gaming
• VPN
• Web 2.0 sites (depending)

[Obadiah]

Exactly. Latency is a huge killer. I would never use sat broadband unless I absolutely had to.

[D-fendr]

I believe the major problem with VPN and satellites is that in order to get the speed satellite compresses/encodes, and since the VPN data is encrypted, it can’t do anything to compress it and speeds crawl to dialup.

I read somewhere some time ago of a method to get around this. I believe in involved creating tunnels on both ends instead of using PPTP.