While I don't live REAL far out, I'm just out of reach of cable. It's a mere five miles away from my house...and yes, I'm stuck with good 'ol Dial-Up. As well as the greatest ISP in the world: AOL. Guess why? We've tried every single other ISP out there (ok, all that I've found!) And all of them can't hold a connection for longer than 20 minutes, before "idleing" but never really disconnecting. I'm pretty sure it's because they all use the same crappy numbers (or has something to do with it), but nonetheless... AOL manages to keep a connection, scary as it is.
The only other option than Dial-up out here is Satelite, which costs:
$700 set-up
2yr Contract/$350 to break contract
$80 month
...and if there's a cloud in the sky, say good bye! IE: not worth it.
Gosh I hope cable makes its' way over here soon...!
And as far as the filter goes, I use one of those
It doesn't do anything as far as I can tell, maybe 1/10 connections is a little faster (54,6... VS 38,8...) but I can tell no performance difference as far as the internet goes. The only games that I've found to work on dial-up are:
GunBound,
StarCraft / XP
Diablo I/II/II XP
WarCraft II/III/III XP
Chess/Checkers/Hearts Etc. (All those types o' games).
and don't get me wrong, they were all great, but not THAT great...so now, I play virtually no games on the web! I hate the fact that most games claim to work on a 24,4 modem...but they run like slugs (skip-de-skip), and even if you could take that crap, you'd probably be booted for lagging
I'll see you on CS. I did that a few times on dial-up, rather funny...you get to watch people come up behind you, stab you in the back...all in slow motion and you can't do a damn thing!