If you have ever lived in a rural area or lived in a town that sits in a depression in the land you will know how difficult getting a good broad band service can be. Rural locations quite often are two far away from the telephone exchange to support a DSL cable hence a bad or nonexistent broad band signal. When this is the case it might be worth considering one of the Satellite Internet Service Provider to get you connected at a reasonable speed, certainly much faster than a dialup connection.
The whole process works by the dish from a broadcasting centre sending the signal to the dish network satellite then to a dish that sits on top of your home. The signal is then sent from your dish to the satellite owned by the online service providers then to the internet.
This process requires two modems one for the downlink of information and one for the uplink of information. Although using such facility is not as fast as broadband it is around 10 times faster than dial up.
This type of service works pretty much the same way as cable TV so it does suffer the same sort of atmospheric interference. You dish needs to be set up facing the right direction and away from interference of hills, trees and other tall buildings.
Some service providers require that you still have a dial up modem to send the information to the system. The connection is just for the down link information, a little bit like sending a pay per view movie to your TV set.
The information you receive will be quicker but sending information will be the same speed as a dialup connection. Living in a rural are sometimes requires this sort of internet provider if you wish to have any type of speed in your service.