Before moving out to "the sticks" last year, I was worried about connectivity. Although I probably could live with dial-up, it wouldn't be much fun. DirecWay's service was universally panned (and still is). Luckily, right about that time (last September), WildBlue service became available in my area. After using it for 9 months or so, it's definitely a qualified "thumbs up". It has its weirdnesses, but it generally works quite well. When it works (which is most of the time), I do get just about 1.5 Mbps down, and around 256Kb up. Not nearly as fast as those who have wired service, but it's better than I expected.
For the moment, installation is free. Check it out...
Now for the weird stuff:
* Their service agreement completely disallows any "outgoing" servers -- Exchange, Web services, IIS, or anything else. Not quite sure how this fits into their "business service" plan, but if you have a problem, and you even MENTION one of those things, they won't talk to you. End of story.
* They SWEAR that they don't block any particular protocols or ports, but listen up: If you use this service, you will not be able to browse in on port 80. Period. I spent days and days trying to get my smart phone to pick up email from my server, without installing a cert so I could use HTTPS. Simply never worked. Wildblue support, of course, wouldn't even discuss it. The moment I got a cert, and switched to using HTTPS to pick up email, it worked fine. I monitored port 80 traffic on my firewall -- it simply never got there. In other words, they're flat out lying to me about it.
* I'm really not sure what's going on, but I cannot log into any site that uses Windows authentication. For example, MCW Technologies has an email server that forwards email to my own Exchange server at home. Occasionally I need to log directly into the MCW server. Simply doesn't work, on port 80. Browsing to almost every site works fine, as long as I don't need to authenticate with a Window account. When I changed the server temporarily to allow access using a port other than port 80 (like port 22225 or something), I could log in fine. This one ought to work, right? They could reproduce it. Their answer: "We don't block access on any ports, but you'll need to change the port." I asked about servers where I CAN'T change the port. They had no response. Oh, wait. It works, magically, around 10% of the time. I get excited, figuring they've fixed the problem, but no -- it's back a few days later. And I'm no the only one who has complained of this. If you have any ideas why I might not be able to log in using port 80 to access the site (given that WildBlue is lying, and they they ARE blocking incoming port 80 traffic to my side of the puzzle, please let me know.
Other than that, it works quite well, and far better than you'd expect. If you have any questions, feel free to let me know. I don't have any other choice (no one would use this service if they had any other choice), but it's way better than the alternatives.