All you bastards bleating about paying for "slow" connections at 10+Mbps can sod off.
We are unable to get anything over 800K/250Kbps via the only provider to the middle of nowhere, BT. (Just measured 868K down and 146K up!) No mobile signal in the main - we now route the mobiles through a femtocell into that same ADSL connection, and it works unless anyone/thing uses the internet whilst on a call. The 1 to 3 second lag in the call can be a bit weird though.
It is so bad we have now installed satellite internet. This acts as the main connection now, at high cost and we get up to 30Gb a month at about 7.5M down and 2.5M up, but with a latency that makes you wonder if the system is even working with every click.
And yes, we would love another phone line, but BT won't supply one.
The local point-to-point supplier is inept beyond description - 13 months of failure, despite line-of-sight - though from reports from other customers around us indicates they get somewhat patchy service and a fraction of the speeds promised, so we may have dodged a bullet there!
The office in the nearby town has dodgy ADSL, again single (BT) supplier, with no data signal at all 90% of the time (even in the high street!)
Anyone in a city where there is fibre-speed broadband under 500m away should just deal with it. The makerspace in Birmingham simply hooked into one of the local businesses via radio link for the first year, and now has a free 100M/40Mbps connection after 6pm, with daytime limited to a small fraction of that, via fibre across a rooftop to nearby business. If that becomes an issue, we will hook into a 4G data connection, capped at whatever use the SIM supports each month.
(Anyone who can't arrange something similar via a data SIM, fibre trailed over a rooftop or the previously mentioned radio links shouldn't even be posting on El Reg, and should hang up their keyboards in shame.)