I was told that there wasn't any high-speed coming to my rural Nebraska area for many years, & that we weren't even on the Telco/ISP's maps for uppgrading to support DSL, & the cable co. is also the alternate Telco & dial-up ISP; As soon as the "Alternate TelCo" decided that the entire town was small enough to fit into one octet of their existing company's WAN/LAN, they started making "high-speed" available, a bit expensive at the time for the speed, but the entire town went with it, (and they couldn't even meet their own speed promises, which were based on speed to & from their own DNS server), but at least it was AVAILABLE; Less than a year later, the "Big Telco", (who is also one of the major ISP "Gateway" providers), suddenly started offering blistering-fast DSL to the entire town, at the same price as the "little guys", but at speeds from T-1 through 7Mbps! (I think someone looked at a map, and saw that there wasn't a single telephone wire in town that was more than 2 miles long, and the 3-mi. length for high-speed DSL would be too easy to pass up, since they were constantly getting calls about "When are you going to give use some kind of broadband 'Net availability out here?"; Voila, suddenly if you change to their phone service, which costs the same as the "Alternate Co.'s", suddenly you could have a T1-speed line, (and for $10 more a month, you could have 5Mbps to 7Mbps DSL), for about the same total cost of your previous phone service and the 56k dial-up! Sometimes they don't know or care themselves, until they find out that someone ELSE got the "cash-cow" that they COULD have, if they'd spend a nickel to make ten bucks, because once they find that they've got competition & are losing a huge market, watch how fast they "upgrade" (translation: anything from "just flipping a switch" to "adding one rack-unit-sized server tray in the existing Central Office that's already here"); Sometimes it just takes a little patience; I know that I'd considered going with satellite, but it's WAY out of line as far as price goes, and there are WAY too many things that you can't DO with a sat connection, (which I don't understand, since I used to be in the satellite data-comm engineering business, with one of the biggest satcom service providers in the country (or maybe bigger); We at least USED to carry the backup data traffic for Marshall Space Flight Center during Shuttle launches, so I really don't understand why a sat link to the 'Net is 1) so expensive, and 2) restrictive in what you can & can't DO on it; Good luck, & hopefully you've already gotten a fast & cheap ISP out your way too... Peace!

Tried netzero.net,Cable company,other telephone co. beside Att.

As far as I know, you can have AT&T internet without having their phone. I ordered for my son who is away in school. He does'nt have a phone in his apartment. He only has his T-Mobile cell phone.