Where's the 'Net ?

This sometimes sorry tale began in late 1999. My wife and I had decided to bail out of Silicon Valley and move to Montana. We're not exactly sure why, but the fact that we couldn't see our neighbors' houses; there were no traffic jams; and one could pop into Costco quickly to buy milk were certainly factors. In Silicon Valley nobody goes to Costco for one small item. You'd be there for an hour at least waiting in line.
House-hunting, we quickly decided that we wanted a place out of town and not on the valley floor where it's flat. That means up in the mountains where life is a little more...rugged and you have to do things for yourself. For example plow snow from the mile of road between your house and the public highway.
At that time I didn't realize that the can-do pioneer spirit would extend to building my own ISP but I did know that a) I needed an Internet connection to perform my work as a software engineer and b) that I couldn't assume that there would be any high speed internet service up in the hills. In fact back then there wasn't much in the way of DSL service in town, and no cable Internet at all.
Thinking I was so smart, I took a laptop with a modem when we went to look at houses. I'd ask the bemused Realtor if it would be ok for me to plug my laptop into the 'phone jack and then I'd see what kind of analog modem performance the lines achieved. This exercise produced mixed results. On one side of the valley modem connections could be made at 40Kbits. However on the other side it was impossible to achieve more than 26Kbits.
We decided to buy a home in the 26Kbits zone.
At this point I decided that I should call the local service providers to find out my complete set of options. In retrospect this was my big mistake.
The local phone company told me that they could provide a T-1 circuit to any point that had a phone line, no exceptions. Back then it was possible to buy 'fractional' T-1 internet service for a high but not extortionate price, so this seemed like a practical option.
The local 'CLEC' DSL company told me that they could deliver something called 'IDSL' to our location. IDSL uses legacy ISDN infrastructure to pipe 140Kbits of DSL-type service.
Both these options seemed workable, and so armed with the knowledge that we had a plan and a backup plan for Internet service, we went ahead and made an offer on our new house.
You can probably guess what happened next. The 'phone company it turned out was 100% fibbing. They actually need to perform a detailed engineering analysis on their plant in order to say if T-1 service can be delivered. Since that involves devoting the time of a smart and expensive person they don't actually do so until someone orders a circuit. It's a catch-22. You can't know if service is available without ordering service. Of course service was not available in our location because the kind of power required for HDSL repeaters (used for T-1 in the modern era) wasn't available on our local loop. Or not for the last three miles or so anyway.
The CLEC meanwhile had decided that they wouldn't make any money from IDSL and had abandoned plans to use it.
So we were now the proud owners of a wonderful home with a 26Kbit Internet connection.