"Inexpensive satellite ISP" doesn't really exist though.
Hmmm, that's what I've been using for the last ten years. Posts do get lost on occasion but I was not aware I had just been posting into the Matrix all this time.
It's what I'm posting on as well. I spend a couple hundred bucks a month, and I get 50 GB to download over the city's dish. On weekends it's pretty slow because a lot of people -- maybe several hundred, or even a couple thousand at a time -- are watching netflix or whatever. There's also a service where you buy a dish for about $100 and pay just $100 per month or less, but it sucks: very low upload speed, and at 6pm it completely craps out when people get home and check Facebook or snapchat or whatever.
That crapping out part is the problem.
If I'd designed an IT system of institutions serving millions of people, assuming a fibre connection, then the satellite backup would be nearly worthless. The satellite "backup" would have a tiny fraction of the bandwidth. If you let the normal systems connect through the satellite, it'll just get overloaded immediately and nobody would get through.
So that means you need to explicitly design a backup system and have procedures laid out of how to use it. The cost of that dwarfs the cost of the dishes.
Just like with global warming, the absolute level of service isn't the issue, it's the change.