Back in the 90s I use to install 2 way Earth Stations for Hughes. An Earth station is basically a box that puts TCP/IP over Satellite. They are installed in many gas stations in the US. If you drive down the street and see a white dish on the roof, chances are my company did the install ;) These links handle credit card transactions for paying at the pump and they also handle lottery purchases.
The industry wasn't regulated very much until a situation in which some installers aiming dishes for EDJ (Edward Jones Financials) were knock things off line by aiming dishes at wrong satellites. I don't know much about how the technology works but it became apparent that aiming a dish at the wrong "bird" as we call them could interfere with others.
The EDJ thing was big news back in the day although a google search turns up nothing. It reportedly knocked Edward Jones off line for something close to a week while many were deployed to go and re-aim satellite dishes.
After this incident, the FCC got more involved and now to install a two way satellite dish, you have to take a course and pass it. My whole team was required to go through this training.
We also installed 2 way satellite internet for a company out of Canada that had a PCI card you plugged into your PC. The PCI card would then connect to the dish transmitter and LNB. The down speed was around 4-5Mb/s while the up speed was very slow at around 128Kb/s. I forget the name of the company but they had a proprietary driver for the PCI card that compressed the TCP packets in order to deal with the huge latency of traveling up to space and back down. They also had patents on a modified TCP/IP stack whereby they could locally ACK outbound TCP packets to improve throughput (as it was explained to me at the time).
In the past such services have used geosynchronous satellites, at least far as I am aware. The problem with that is the great height of the satellites means a pretty serious lag. IIRC, about 250 ms, round trip. LEO satellites, however, would have a tiny amount of lag added.
I can't speak for Hughes but I was a trained tech for WildBlue /Exede. Neither of their services have ever used dial-up for upload. While early generation WildBlue services were fairly slow on the upload, Exede was able to push 4+ mbit to the subscriber fairly constantly.
That was true 10 years ago. I'm on a 50 GB/month Satellite link that is many, many miles away from any type of alternative comms right now. Everything, upload and download, is through the GeoSynch Satellite. 600 ms latency, but data rate is pretty good - around 10 mbits/second.
