Don't mourn that you can't afford it. You'd feel like you'd poured your money down a black hole. The problem is the speed of light, times 23,000 miles to geosynch or bounced around the LEO Iridium network, which introduces a time delay which snarls things up no end. I once tried to hold a Skype conversation with a guy in the remote Sierras on satellite, and it never worked, all we got was a duck squawking alternating with whale song. The latency screws up video, too, and everything to some degree, because the Internet protocols require an acknowledgement of every packet of data. Slow down those acknowledgements, and everything slows down to molasses.

Sprint seems to have the least-spotty coverage. Virgin Mobile resells them packaged in some pretty decent pay-as-you-go plans. The coverage map shows solid LTE in urban areas, 3G over a wider area but with big holes in it, and only voice gives nearly universal coverage in the US. We're nowhere near universal wireless data coverage yet.