In its battle for market share in satellite television, Dish Network is jumping to cross the digital divide by bundling a new broadband satellite Internet service with speeds that are faster than most DSL land-line services. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Monday, Dish CEO Joe Clayton announced a partnership with ViaSat that will allow the company to offer broadband service with download speeds as fast as 12Mbps and upload speeds of up to 3Mbps. Clayton said that the service would be available as part of Dish service bundles, starting at $79.98 a month.

The satellite broadband service opens up a potential market of 8 to 10 million customers in rural areas who currently can't get land-line broadband service, Clayton said. The broadband service is through ViaSat's Ka-band WildBlue, which is tied to the ViaSat-1 satellite—as such, it requires the installation of a second antenna.

Purpose-built for IP-based services, the ViaSat-1 has a network capacity of 140Gbps. ViaSat also offers the WildBlue service on its own, starting at $50 per month. Additionally, ViaSat will provide the service wholesale to the National Rural Telcommunications Cooperative.

With nearly nationwide coverage, including "spot beams" that cover Hawaii, the WildBlue service is competitively priced in comparison to DSL and other alternatives—especially those available in rural areas. The main downsides of the service are the high latency of satellite communications and the potential drop-off in network performance as the service becomes more popular. Ars will be getting a closer look at WildBlue from ViaSat on January 10.

The WildBlue bundle isn't the end of Dish's satellite internet ambitions. Clayton said the company plans to offer additional broadband services from its sister company Echostar/Hughes, with the planned launch of that company's JUPITER Ka-band satellite later this year.