I had Starband for a few years because it was the only way I could get highspeed internet in my rural area. I dropped it once Cable Modems were available because of cost.

It worked pretty well and was alot faster than dial-up, but it was really expensive. Cable was half the cost. Look at the monthly cost, the equipment cost, and any cost you might have to pay to run wires.

The thing about satellite is that it's designed to be superfast for sending info TO you. When you have to send info back to the net (running a web server, playing an interactive game, uploading to the net), it's much slower. Because of the slower upload speeds you also can't do realtime multiplayer games well (this is called latency -- the delay in getting groups of information back and forth to you). This isn't the end of the world unless you (1) live for realtime games, eg. Doom (2) plan on hosting your own fast web site locally It does work VERY nice for downloading software and music and such.

Technically in my opinion, any of these can be considered "broadband" as they are all significantly faster than dial-up and are always on.

Some of the providers try to limit what you can do. Most of these limits are easy to circumvent. For example I can run a Web server on my home computer even know my cable internet provider says it's not allowed.

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