I too live in a rural area. Until the phone company ran DSL about a year ago we had satallite internet through Wild Blue. It was $50 a month. We had to pay for the modem and dish and setup but compared to dial up it was worth it. The only problem we had was my husband brought his computer from work home and tried to hook up to it and it didn't work. However, the problem was because of we both work at the local hospital so the program on his computer to enable him to hook up to the hospital system via internet had such high security settings and it operated on a different speed. With the satallite there were 3 packages and we had the cheap one. They told us at work it "probably" would have worked if we bought the most expensive package with a higher speed. Luckily DSL came along for that reason.
Something I wasn't aware of when we got the satallite was there was a download limit. Once the limit was reached there was an extra cost. At the time my DD was applying to colleges and doing all the stuff teenagers do and there were a couple of times we came close to the download max.
Hope this helps.