Rural Internet Options for those without a phone line

DSL and Cable are not an option you say?  Check to see if you have a local wireless provider – either via satellite line of sight or via a town wireless system.  One such example locally in the Washington County area in Wisconsin is Bertram Wireless.  They put a small dish on your roof up on a small tower so that it can see the distribution point they have available.  http://www.bertramwireless.com/residential_pricing.htm

If there is not a line of sight provider available, go with a Verizon Wireless mobile hot spot – they have the best network for most rural areas.  Check their coverage map to make sure.  You can share that hot spot with a home wireless router (if necessary).  To do this, you would need:
With a 2 yr contract, this device is free.  Early termination fee on the contract is $175.  Without a contract, the price of the device is $269.99

At this time, Verizon has multiple shared data plans for this device ranging from 4 Gb to 12 Gb starting at $30 / month and up.

The low tier options should be plenty for you if you are not doing a lot of streaming video or music (e.g. movies on netflix)), but if you are – you will run out of bandwidth quickly and should look to a higher cost plan.

b. A home wireless router (if you want to share printers, files between computers, etc.) If you don’t need to do this, up to five computers can get online with just the hot spot device you get from Verizon.  The hot spot does not handle sharing files and printers well though, it can crash the device regularly and cause some connection issues.  So, you can get a router that shares the hot spot connection and provides an internal network that is more resilient that what the hot spot offers:

The CradlePoint router will offer you the ability to share the Internet connection from the MiFi, AND do decent sharing of printers and files. If you try to do this on just the MiFi – Internet sharing will be no problem, but sharing printers and files will not work well.