I was reading The Register, as one does over lunch, when I spotted this article: Rural Hants could get wireless broadband. Seeing as I live in rural Hants, and have no chance of ADSL or cable, this seemed like an interesting story.
As far as I can tell sPten are using fixed-wireless technology, typically based on the technically superior, but commercially dead, Qualcomm CDMA system. Basically they put up a mobile (cellular) phone mast on top of a hill. You have a mains operated phone bolted to the roof of your house, and the box of tricks converts a CDMA signal into a nice 10MBit RJ-45 presented ethernet feed.
I could have a symmetrical 128k connection for ã10/month ($15/month), which is less than I pay for a 56k dial-up! The only snag is that our village is right on the edge of the current coverage.....
Though not as interesting SatDrive have opened an office opposite my house. This technology isn't as friendly, as it's very expensive, very asymmetric, and doesn't run on Linux, Mac, or NT - you have to have 98/Me/2K/XP.