The Spirit Realm

I have the same thing happen, Thats how I knew he was dead, RL was telling everyone good job and go get your flags. So I went to the door to karana's room, and everyone was running past me, I watched them run through the door that was closed to me and could see the Hails, but door was shut for me untill agnarr died a min or two later.

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!

If you can get ISDN, you will find that is a heck of a lot better than dialup. The connect delay is so much smaller

The computer line is on its own second phone line. There's no difference in speed between that and the main house line. Just ratty old telephone lines out in the country. The phone company doesn't offer another 'quality' of phone line. I've already asked if I could pay more for better, no luck.
Modem bonding is another option, but then I'm adding another phone line and another isp (mine wont let you dial in twice on one acct), putting it within shouting distance of isdn on price, but not on speed.
The problem is getting worse and maybe there's something else going on as well. Last night we did epic mobs again. Sure enough, when the mob was there I had 10+ second lag. Just out of curiosity, I opened task manager. Network bandwidth load was 20%. All night I never saw it go over 30% even with 20 second lag. I can understand heavy lag on ae mobs with 65+ people in raid, I've dealt with that for years. But 55 people in scarlet desert is now laggy where I never had trouble with situations like that before.

Ditto, little podunk town here too. My dialup connection most days is about 26k.
Nothing else is really available yet, although there have been rumors of installing a wireless isp somewhere near.

Even so, I never used to have trouble with it. I can even tell you exactly when the trouble started for me. It was the patch this past May 11. I had just assumed something was instituted that day that dramatically increased the bandwidth requirements. I used to be able to raid, once upon a time. No more. Anything over 3-4 groups ends up giving me vicious lag leading to LD-land.

I want my /serverfilter and datarate parameters back!