What about satellite service ?

Satellite Internet service is available everywhere (unless you happen to have an immovable object blocking the high southern sky) so why didn't I have that installed ?
Well, there are a few problems with Satellite service, or at least I have a few problems with it:

1. It's a long way up to those birds. They're in geostationary orbit which any schoolboy* knows is 20-something thousand miles up. Your packets travel at the speed of light so they take 400ms to make the round trip. This latency means that some Internet applications such as interactive login, remote desktop and telephony are all but unusable.
2. Upload throughput is poor. As any electronics engineer knows, it takes more power to transmit at higher bits/s. The FCC, and economics, and safety, limit the power available to transmit up to the satellite. Also the need to have clear air to transmit when there are thousands of other users sharing the same channel limits transmit duty cycle. Residential satellite connections are still today limited to around 200Kbits/s upload speed, best case.
3. Speaking of best-case...the various satellite Internet providers that have come and gone over the years share one common factor : their service starts out at launch with reasonable quality of service, but degrades significantly as they sign up more and more users. This is hardly surprising since large numbers of users are sharing a common RF channel. As a user you should plan for the level of service available once your provider succeeds in signing up millions of users. If they don't succeed then you won't have service at all. If they do succeed you will have lower quality of service than you experienced initially.

Satellite service is better than dialup because it doesn't require an extra phone line, and it doesn't have the connection establishment delay. For me though it doesn't cut it. I need fast upload speed and I need low latency from my connection. And I need predictable quality of service.

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*Or schoolgirl.