A few years ago I got StarBand at my house due to the same rural limitations you suffer. We ended up using our 2 dialup connections along with the satellite and eventually just got rid of the satellite.
It was terribly slow during peak hours (anything not midnight to 8am). During the off hours we could get download speeds of up to 2megabits/sec.
Secure webpages just didn't work. I don't know if that was due to restrictions by StarBand or not. (to boost performance, they limited a lot of things you could do)
The ~800ms latency made things like Telnet and SSH almost unusable. E-mail via Outlook also didn't work as it would time out too quickly.
IMHO, it isn't worth the grief, unless you keep your dialup connection and use them simultaneously. With a proxyserver we were able to do the undoable-over-satellite via dialup.
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A few years ago I got StarBand at my house due to the same rural limitations you suffer. We ended up using our 2 dialup connections along with the satellite and eventually just got rid of the satellite. It was terribly slow during peak hours (anything not midnight to 8am). During the off hours we could get download speeds of up to 2megabits/sec. Secure webpages just didn't work. I don't know if that was due to restrictions by StarBand or not. (to boost performance, they limited a lot of things you could do) The ~800ms latency made things like Telnet and SSH almost unusable. E-mail via Outlook also didn't work as it would time out too quickly. IMHO, it isn't worth the grief, unless you keep your dialup connection and use them simultaneously. With a proxyserver we were able to do the undoable-over-satellite via dialup.