WebUser - have you used both starband and wildblue?
For years starband said that ftp and secure sites wouldn't work well over satellite because of the latency. Yet somehow the day I switched from starband to wildblue, no more problems. With starband I would drop to dialup to ftp or whenever I had to load more than a few pages of a secure site. Over starband ftp would fail when trying to upload multiple directories 1/3 of the time requiring retry after retry.
With wildblue, ftp directory listings are twice as fast as dialup (slower to swtich but much much faster to get the listing), and there are no more failures when uploading dozens of files in dozens of directories.
Secure sites load great - again much faster than dialup and much much faster than starband.
Raw download speed is also significantly faster than with starband, upload speed is many times faster so there is no comparison, and browsing has been reliable whereas with starband there were periods of the red-x problem and the constant need to toggle their proxy.
Due to the latency satellite will always feel more like a truck than a sports car like cable or dsl, and will never be as snappy as cable or dsl, but at least for my use (4 1/2 years with starband and since September with wildblue) Wildblue certainly is a significant improvement over starband. I have not a single regret about making the switch other than I wish wildblue had been available sooner