[RickM]

Milt, I believe this is an enhanced caching of info. In other words if you visit a page the contents are saved in memory or on your hard drive. When you go back to a previously visited page it will display what is unchanged from memory (much faster than over a phone line) and only repopulate the changed data from over the line. This is already done to a lesser extend with IE.

The speed they advertise is very dependent on your surfing habits and web site structure. Also, if a site is hosted on an over-saturated server or slow server it's going to slow going for everyone. The XX (5-10?) times faster than dial-up claims they make are under absolute ideal conditions.

Satellite would be much faster but as you mention at a cost. Is DSL available through your phone company? That would be the route I'd take if Cable were unavailable.