The purchase price isn't that bad, but the data plans are pretty frightening.
Herb
Wow, those have come down in size and price. I used one years ago in Africa that was the size of a large laptop, cost thousands, and got you, on a good day, the throughput of a phone modem. and that was only 6-8 years ago.
I have and it comes with a lot of caveats. Fine for voice and SMS but any other data intensive applications requires you use their browser which strips,out pictures and their email app which only supports text and tiny, tiny attachments.
Max data speed off the sats is 9600 baud so they've created custom apps that are the only ones that work.
I soused the first version wifi successfully at Everest base camp and elsewhere and it's great for voice calls, texts and simple text based email but fortpget a typical web experience.
I have an extended sat antenna mounted on the top of my roof (fiberglass top) and a cable runs to the dash so I can plug in my sat phone and don't have to be outside.