Triple_7 and Esselbach,
I'm in the same boat, only I live inside of the city limits! I think that it has to do with the
type of phone lines. Since I've never had highspeed internet, I know next to nothing about it, but I think that it requires fiber-optic lines. My area, and probably your areas too, are still on the old copper lines, so they actually can't run DSL service through them. It would be expensive for them to replace all of the phone lines, so phone companies won't do it unless there is a big demand for it. In my case, not only am I stuck with dial-up, but abnormally slow dial-up at that. I could live with it if it at least went at regular old dial-up speeds, but it doesn't. I haven't downloaded anything in about a year.
