My parents had Satellite internet for two years. It's not bad for browsing, but it's useless for online gaming. The pings are horrible, at best they would get 600ms, sometimes they would get 1800ms, which really sucked. A good internet connection should have under 100ms pings (lower the better). My parents had xplornet, it's a company in Canada, if I remember right it uses the same hardware and satellite as Wild Blue in the United States.
My parents could also download without any caps in place from around 2am-7am, like Elizabeth said. Xplornet seems to use a different download threshold than Earthlink. It's an hourly one. I think you could download 30MB an hour and then it would slow you down to a crawl for the rest of the hour, it never disconnected all together though and the threshold reset every hour.
Satellite is definitely better than dial up, but pretty much any other high speed internet connection is better than Satellite. So make very sure there is nothing else in your area like wireless internet for example before you sign up for satellite. Satellite is also more expensive than the average high speed internet connection.
A wireless internet tower went up near my parents place, so they switched to wireless in August this year. The pings are way better, they average 50-70ms. They can also now download whenever they want and it also works pretty good for online gaming and costs half as much as satellite did.
