If you're outside the range of terrestrial options, your only choice for broadband is a satellite broadband provider. Unfortunately, as our user reviews for Wild Blue and HughesNet will tell you -- satellite broadband barely earns the broadband title as it suffers from high latency, slow speeds, and very high prices. The expensive and limited capacity of satellite broadband also means the service often comes with very high usage caps. These caps are called "fair access policies" or FAPs by carriers, are usually very low, and if crossed can result in your satellite connection being throttled back to below dial up speeds.

Even with these low caps satellite carriers have struggled to provide adequate capacity, and both HughesNet and WildBlue users have complained for several years now that they frequently don't get anything close to the speed they're paying for. A few years back Wild Blue had to stop signing up new customers because they could barely service the customers they had. But customers hope things are changing with the recent news that ViaSat has acquired WildBlue. ViaSat is sending e-mails to customers highlighting the fact that the satellite operator will be launching the ViaSat-1 satellite in 2011.

ViaSat is claiming that ViaSat-1 is aimed at meeting bandwidth demands and stopping the cycle of congestion and capped subscriber growth, and offers more capacity than "all current North American satellites combined." ViaSat-1 is designed to host more than a million subscribers, according to the company, and holds ten times the throughput of any other Ka-band satellite. With in orbit costs per gigabyte reduced significantly, hopefully this means some relief for WildBlue customers.

Of course they'll have to wait until 2011 or later to get it. Meanwhile, it has been interesting to watch both WildBlue and HughesNet lobby Uncle Sam for broadband stimulus funds, with their apparent pitch literally being "hey, we're not that bad."