I'm curious as to the best providers and roughly how much it costs. My daughter can't get dsl where she's at and satellite might be the way to go for her new laptop. I don't know much about it so thanks for any info you can throw my way.

Hi Shrack...I don't personally use it, but my son in law has it. I helped him research it. He went with "Wild Blue". Admittedly, it's better than dial up for downloading files, but it's horrible for gaming. I chose Wild Blue because of the cost over Hughes Net (formerly DirecWay).
One warning tho'...they've had some connectivity issues, but no worse than satellite tv. http://www.wildblue.com is the address. Their customer service has been ok...a little slow sometimes, but friendly and willing to work out any problems until solved.
Again...we chose them because they were a heck of a lot cheaper the Hughes.
Ken

If she has a laptop getting an EV-DO unlimited plan and card from Verizon might be cheaper and give her the added benefit of being connected ANYWHERE there is Verizon service.

Interesting choices here. Thanks to both of you for the info.

Hi Schrack:
I use Wild Blue. Costs me $75 a month. It sucks. but it's all I've got until SBC gets DSL in my neighborhood. The wireless DSL company I used before (which was averaging 700k/sec down and 500k up) went awol, and dialup is avergaging 24k, so I'm stuck. I'm lucky to get 500K down, and VERY lucky to get 80K up. There are times around 12am to 2am when the signal goes down without warning, probably maintainance, but it's not predictable. I still have time to finish half a game of solitaire before pages load, which beats dialup when I can finish two games before the page loads, but DSL it isn't. Closer to ISDN (which is just a notch above dialup in my book-had it at the office for 2 years) than DSL. Only if you're desperate....

ISDN you can get anywhere but the billing is outragous