I had satellite about 10 years ago when it was that or dial-up. I had it with Starband, partnered with Dish. It was so bad I switched to dial-up and saw an improvement, and I even ate 4 months of service because Starband wouldn't let me out of the 1 yr contract even though it was much worse than advertised. I needed to use a VPN to get into work, and it didn't hold the VPN connection well at all. I'd have to reconnect a dozen times a day. Even without VPN, I'd lose service a few times a day. Not sure how much better it might be now, but I'm under the impression that it's not all that much better.
The delays really killed me. Part of the problem is that I was using it for work, and I do a lot of interactive work on remote machines. There's something like a 1.5 second delay guaranteed just because of the distance to the satellites. The service was so lousy that it ranged from 2 to 10 seconds, and that unpredictability made it unbearable. I would type something, know that I had a typo, and then wait to see it appear on the screen, and carefully count how many times I had to hit backspace, or else I'd have to wait and make sure I was changing the right letter. Horrible. When I switched to dial-up, I found I could live with the slow but steady speed.
If you are just doing web browsing and email, nothing interactive, it won't be horrible, but I still don't think it'd be that good. Absolutely forget about any online gaming or skype, and even chatting would probably be too annoying for the other person to wait for you.
The fixed wireless access should be a lot better because the delays are much less, just going to a nearby tower rather than out in space. I've heard from a few people using one around here, and it can be spotty (semi-frequent outages) but is generally usable.