We live over 5 miles from the local telco central office. This meant that no ADSL or ISDN was available. A 56K line would have cost several hundred dollars per month, if they could pull it, and a T1 was going to cost in excess of 1250 per month with a 3,000 dollar install. Either option would require some sort of long term contract, too. Hybrid cable was available, but it's high latency and slow 28.8 modem based uplink was unacceptable for our purposes.
We could see bandwidth, only a few miles away, 384k ADSL for only $230/month, 6 times what we could get with a 56K frame relay. So we embarked on our wireless journey and eventually built what you are reading about here.
We figure the economics of high speed internet networking in parts of the world outside of California are even more biased in favor of the local telco monopoly. If you are willing to live with the occasional heavy weather based network outage, want to save money on an upfront and monthly basis, and are within line of sight (LOS) of somebody else with an internet connection who is less than 16 miles away, read on....