Actually, with satellite connection the biggest problem is network latency. That is, all your quotes received will be a little more delayed, and whatever order you send will get a little delayed to your broker as well - compared to broadband network connection.
Equally, that is why e.g all the good players of online games like starcraft, Half-Life etc. all use wire-connected mice and keyboards - and not wireless counterparts.
So, if latency is really important - e.g for automated trading or client-side triggers - then it might be a little more trouble depending on what kind of market and strategies you work with.
Otherwise - the bandwidth is no problem with the newer satellite broadband systems - which also use return channels nowadays. Check out DVB-RCS for that. E.g
www.dvb.org .
The US doesn't use DVB for it's digital satellite broadcast system - but uses the DVB-MHP standard for interaction - or at least was going to do so - last time I checked.
Check out ATSC for US digital sat. info - or ISDB if you're in Japan. Brazil was rumoured to be planning their own digi-tv standard as well - so they can make all their hardware in Brazil - just like they do with the low quality TVs here and the peculiar PAL-M standard (I used to invest in digital TV satellite equipment providers and was at first surprised by this - until I got to know brazilians better).
The point is - be careful about committing too much resources on cutting edge technology on new frontiers.
Otherwise the IEEE 802.16 wimax wireless network standard is starting to get some momentum and frequency auctions have been held - which also provides good bandwidths over large areas at low cost. Check out e.g
www.wimaxforum.org .
With 20 futures - you're fine with 256 or 512 Kbps - but be sure to have at least 256 Kbps return channel - or 512 Kbps with 1Mbps so that you can efficiently send orders and other network traffic - like email, instant messages etc.
If you get into trouble with varying network loads, critical latency traffic like futures trading and use a lot of capacity demanding services like e.g IP-telephony, streaming multimedia etc. then you might want to consider a traffic shaping network router. Check out the Linksys WRT 54GS for a very cheap version of this which even runs open-source Linux-based routing software. This will throttle different network services for you.
You can do a search in this forum for more links which I provided earlier on this router.
