At least in the US, satellite use is fairly limited compared to fiber and copper, mainly in the following areas - TV broadcast - Data and voice to remote areas (a few hundred Alaska villages, some connectivity up to oil drilling areas in Alaska, though there's also fiber, plus some Internet in non-wired parts of the US. I'm not aware of regular telco use of satellites for service in the middle 48 states. Is Alohanet or something like it still running in Hawaii?) - Some emergency backup applications such as restoration for carriers (redundant cables are nice, but you need access in multiple failure scenarios such as floods and earthquakes.) - Specialized enterprise applications (some years ago, VSAT was fairly common for credit-card support at gas stations, malls, etc. I know one grocery store chain that finally moved to terrestrial in the late 90s, forced by Microsoft application protocols that couldn't handle the VSAT latency.) -- ---- Thanks; Bill Note that this isn't my regular email account - It's still experimental so far. And Google probably logs and indexes everything you send it.