I know I'm bringing back up a week old topic but oh well.
Well got a new smart phone and was playing with tethering it to my computer to use my cell phone as internet and did a speed test with it.

I got 1185kbps download and 99kbps upload. As you can see not super duper fast but a fair bit faster than the satellite and a lot of dsl. It's not bad at all for using the phone as a modem. These are about the speeds I saw with my Razr too. The unlimited tethering plan is $10 a month if you have a smartphone or $30 a month for a normal phone. Still both are cheap for unlimited internet of this speed that's wireless and you can take whereever you want as long as you get signal.