Back in 2004, you may remember me touching on the subject of satellite Internet. And while there was only but a paragraph to cover the points that I had to make, it did make a home for itself in my memory. Roughly two years later, how has the satellite Internet industry done for itself? Not all that great.

The fact remains that it is still just as expensive for all parties involved. Nothing has changed. We are still being hit with really high costs and quite frankly, even worse latency problems.

It’s interesting, but for the home user there just seems like very little reason why they would want to bother with this service. I mean, they can give away satellite equipment for TV viewing, but really dump the cost on you when it comes to Internet options.

Please, don’t take my word for it:

DIRECWAY- Monthly Price $59.99 with a $599.98 upfront cost. If you prefer, you can instead go with a monthly of $99.99 and $99.99 upfront.

StarBand - They are $49.99 - $69.99/mo. with an upfront fee of $399-$599 for equipment as well (like with their competitor above)

Oh sure, there are others out there. But let me the first to tell ya that the price point just keeps going up, not down. So where does this leave us? Should the rural home user stay clear from this? To be honest, it depends. For me, I would have to use one of these in place of dial-up. I work from home, sometimes with a real need for access to multimedia content. So for someone like me that is a bit of a telecommuter, it is critical for me to have access to a high speed connection.

And to be brutally honest, the same would have to go for all of the holdouts still limping along on dial-up and trying to run a repair business. I am speaking directly to those of you doing repair work on computers from home. Downloading drivers must set you guys back by hours and hours collectively. Time for an upgrade, you’ll be happier for it - latency and all.

[tags]high speed,latency,broadband,satellite[/tags]