Our last house in NY was in a rural area, too far away for DSL and no cable available. My only option was DirecWay satellite. On a good day, I wished for dial up. On a bad day, I couldn't even use the internet. Snow, rain, clouds, a humming bird hovering over the dish all cause it to go out.
Then, they cap your bandwidth to 169MB in a 3 hour stretch and no more than 22 TCP connections open simultaneously. Your upload speed will be around 2kb/sec. Downloading is not bad but again, they cap your bandwidth usage. When you get capped, its usually for 24 hours or more and they reduce your bandwidth down to NOTHING. Literally, 0.02kb/sec up and down.
The latency is unbearable, especially for surfing and loading pages with a lot of images or security (SSL/encryption).
On top of all those wonderful things, you get to pay twice as much as DSL or cable!
When we moved to Atlanta, I had to restrain myself from burning it down before we left. It was a horrible internet experience. I guess it's a good alternative for people that want a little better than dial up and don't need it for work. Other than that, I'd rather live in a shit hole apartment with real broadband than live in the middle of nowhere with satellite. Yes, it's THAT bad.