> One concern would be connectivity. Maybe you could read Hacker News via an (expensive) satellite hookup but it seems like it would be more difficult to have s

> One concern would be connectivity. Maybe you could read Hacker News via an (expensive) satellite hookup but it seems like it would be more difficult to have streaming video. I know this isn't really your point, but video is actually one of the better use-cases for satellite internet. The problem with Satellite isn't bandwidth (I mean, it is, but that's only because most of them are old and there aren't enough of them.) The fundamental problem with satellite internet is latency; the speed of light to get up to where we usually put 'em and back down is... significant. The only realistic way to overcome that is to put the satellite in a much lower (and thus much less stable) orbit, which means replacing them frequently; there have been a bunch of cool-sounding proposals to do this, but it hasn't happened. But... the point is that satellite is great for non-interactive stuff. If you can buffer, say, half a second without causing problems, there's no reason why you would be unhappy with Satellite, so streaming video would work beautifully. Games and skype would be unusable. Web pages would load noticeably slower. But your streaming video and large downloads, potentially, would be competitive with the shitty broadband we're used to here in the US.