If you live in the mulga or in town but are hanging off an older RIM you can usually get 128k ISDN. This is not expensive and has the ability to drop back to 64k when you receive an incoming or make an outgoing call.
There is a lot of confusion with regard to data rates a bit like pawer output on stereos.
128k ISDN will transfer a bee's dick under 16Kb/s uncompressed and up to 40Kb/s compressed. ISDN is ALWAYS 8Kb/s per channel (in aus), there are no "bad connections".
This means you can pull zip files or mpegs at 16Kb/s.
Analog 56k is 4-5Kb/s on a good day and usually 2-3Kb/s in the scrub.
Although it is not as fast as DSL or 1sat (or even 2sat) it has reasionably low latency of 30-60ms for most of Australia sites as opposed to 200ms for PSTN and 600-800 for 1sat.
All you need to do is apply for ISDN Enhanced (Onramp Home) and the nice telco man will deliver you a NT1+2 (ISDN modem) with a USB, async serial and S-Bus interface. You can then connect to your ISP provided they provide ISDN (most do)
I used this for years before DSL became available.
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