First, a general thought.  I love this site; hats off to whoever runs it--it's great.  One thing I notice is that it seems that satellite providers are all small time operations; it reminds me of dial-up modem services in the USA 10-15 years ago before consolidation by AOL/Earthlink/etc.  Is this true?  The hypothesis is that satellite ISPs are renting time from whoever owns the satellite, then subleasing it to end-users/customers.  I doubt the satellite providers make more than 10-50M$/yr in revenue and have more than a few thousand customers, no?

Second, my real concern is that I would like to set up a satellite dish to do light-internet surfing, email, and Skype VoIP for one person in some remote mountains in southern Greece (elevation 1000m).  I am not that experienced with this technology though I have an engineering background and have build many a PC from scratch (I am running ADSL on a Pentium IV right now).

Who is the "best" for Greece?  Or top three?  (GR has one of the lowest DSL /high-speed internet usage rates in Europe, something like <5% of the population, so cable/DSL is out of the question for this remote site).  I do have a static telephone line at this location (if that matters) but it's old fashioned (supports dial-up modem at best).

I doubt I will have more than 1 Gb/month data downloaded, but 512k or 1024kbps is a 'must' (for the Skype VoIP).

Also I'm frugal--I am willing (sans hardware) to spend a maximum of maybe 400 Euro/month in fees (hopefully less) but not more.  This is not for an internet cafe.

Please post here if possible--this is a long term project (I'll have a decision by early next year) right now I'm just collecting information.

Thanks!

Sincerely,

FA
<francoisappert_at_yahoo.com>