Regarding bandwidth of T1 vs. satellite.
I use VPN over satellite to work from home on occasion but the bandwith is insufficient over Hughes. I bought the commercial quality dish, static IP address and get priority usage(they say). Speed check reveals 1.3MBps download and 330kBps upload speed.
T1 should deliver 1.5MBps. Comparing these two numbers, it would seem there is little difference in speed so I am undecided if I should switch.
What am I missing.
I know I lose about half of my speed over satellite due to the VPN. Would this also be true over T1? Availability would also improve substantially but the main reason to switch would have to be bandwidth for me to make the change. Currently I cannot access many applications from home due to bandwith limitations.
My router is a Netgear 108Mbps that is 802.11b & g capable which does not seem to be the problem with passing bandwidth to my laptop.

It's not the transfer rates that are killing you it's the latency. Satellite has horrible latency. What I mean by latency is the time that it takes the signal to go from the ground to the satellite (in the sky) back down to the ground. If you are thinking about T1 I would say go for it but if you can a more economical solution would be cable/dsl--these would be best if you are not trying to run a business from your home. You should see much faster connection via a land line. the speed of your connection should improve with a T1 and using a VPN, mainly because of the improvement in latency. What type of application are we talking about?

You do realize a T1 cost is around $600 a month - at least in the US. A fractional T1 is still in the $2-3 hundred range. Almost with the demarc and telco coming out to install...

I hope you're talking about Cable or DSL.. not a T1. Companies use T1s.. not individuals at home.. at least today.

for home use i'd recommend cable or fiber....

but if you have sattelite i'm guessing you're choices do not include either cable or fiber which kind of sucks.

pwnage's answer was good though, talking about the connection latency.