Hi nam045 and welcome to the forums.
I used 1-way satellite for 4 years, before DSL became available in my area. It was a similar connection speed to the one you describe, around 1 MB down and 36k up.
It was pretty good. But if there's any way you can get an ISDN upstream of 128k, that really makes for a sweet combination. Better performance than 2-way satellite IMO, even though the upstream is not as fast.
But yeah, I was on 1-way with an even slower upstream of 36k. And sometimes I could only connect at 28k. Because the full dialup connection is devoted to upstream traffic only, it's not as bad as it sounds. The web browsing performance was excellent - the latency hardly noticable. For other applications, because of the 1 or 2 seconds it takes for the data to hit the sattelite and come back to earth, the latency is too slow. So you can forget about online gaming, you'd get better pings running the whole connection off dialup. And things like video conferencing that require a decent upstream are just impossible.
For me it was always about downloading fast, and it does that very well. IRC & Kazaa will be fine, if it's a fast server you'll get your full 1MB down. P2P applications that require simultaneous uploading/downloading such as bittorrent will not perform so well. You'll need to get into your bittorrent client settings and limit your max peer connections to 10 or so, some experimentation recommended. If it's a well seeded torrent you should still get a good download speed, but if it's not well seeded (lots of people serving the full file) performance will be even worse than it is for the rest of us.
1-way satellite was only ever a hassle if I wanted to send a large email or upload a file to a server - the upstream would crawl along, but if I ever wanted to download something it was bloody fast.
Good luck, hope that helps
