I can't speak for Hughes but I was a trained tech for WildBlue /Exede. Neither of their services have ever used dial-up for upload. While early generation WildBlue services were fairly slow on the upload, Exede was able to push 4+ mbit to the subscriber fairly constantly.

That was true 10 years ago. I'm on a 50 GB/month Satellite link that is many, many miles away from any type of alternative comms right now. Everything, upload and download, is through the GeoSynch Satellite. 600 ms latency, but data rate is pretty good - around 10 mbits/second.