I live out in the country and don’t have many options. Dial-up or satellite, both of which suck. The best option I found is Sprint Mobile Broadband. It works through cell phone towers, and if you pull the right strings you can get it for $50 a month. It works through a USB adapter or laptop card, and I bought a wireless router that the laptop card plugs into and routes the connection to my whole house.
It wasn’t this good at first, but right now I’m getting about 1 megabit down and 200 kilobytes up.
Verizon has the same sort of thing, but they limit you to 5GB a month, which is probably fine for most users.
Anyway, if you’re out in the country and can’t get DSL or cable but can get cell service (my tower is 6 miles away), this might be something to look into.