A couple of months ago, Eutelsat launched a next generation satellite (KA-SAT) for Internet access in Europe and it seems it has ended up in the right orbit and it will be taken into service shortly. Especially one number is quite interesting: The satellite is said to have a capacity of 70 GBit/s, that's 70.000 MBit/s. If you divide this by the capacity of a big fat LTE base station would have, let's say 70 MBit/s to make the calculation easy, that corresponds to 1.000 base stations.
Obviously a little dish is required to communicate with the satellite so it is for stationary use only. But for rural Internet access at home that doesn't really matter beyond getting it set-up in the first place. 1.000 base stations shot into orbit, an interesting picture to visualize.
Exactly! And there are plans for similar systems in future. And some of them can be mobile, using tracking dishes or phased arrays. Inmarsat already uses such technology at L-band for it’s maritime services, and Boeing did this on aircraft (but ultimately it wasn’t a commercial success at that time).