My definition of "Rural" probably means something different here in the UK, but until earlier this year the only choices for Internet connectivity here were analogue dialup, ISDN or satellite. (I'm in a village stuck out near the Thames Estuary, surrounded by fields and marshes).
Analogue dialup used to connect at 46 or 48K (I'm only a mile away from the small telephone exchange that serves the village), but I ended up coughing up the extra and going for ISDN. For a few years I connected via an ISDN router, which gave a seamless connection - not sure how it is in the States, but over here dialup ISPs generally give you a freephone number for your monthly fee, so I didn't have to worry about time spent online.
Ping times went way down on ISDN, which helped immensely with things like Quake as well! The only limiting thing was that downloads still weren't exactly blazingly fast, but 7K a second was better than 5K a second I had before. Then again as ISDN is made of two phone lines bundled together I received an extra phone number for making calls while online, or if I wanted to pay a few pence a minute for two local-rate calls it was possible to get a 128K connection going.
Finally British Telecom saw the light and pledged to hook up over 99% of the UK to ADSL; our exchange was duly upgraded earlier this year. To be honest for EQ it really doesn't feel any different from ISDN, but surfing the Web is another matter.
Then again I thought BT was caning it by charging the equivalent of 45 bucks a month for ISDN line rental (a plain vanilla analogue line is around 20 a month) - 130 is nuts!
