I recently got away from Dial-up about a year ago, and man, I feel your horrible pain.
I did a ton of research on ISDN... Er... tried. IDSN seems to be pretty outdated these days, when I made phone calls to the local phone company, they barely seemed to know what it was and when they did, they made it sound like it was going to be very very expensive.
We then tried cellular internet. Our very rural connection connects at 120kbps, which means about 20 kb/s actual transfer rate. Latency was high but the downloads were far faster. Through Edge Wireless (Now AT&T) it was about 50 dollars a month added to our cell plan, and it was just a little USB adapter. My only complaint is that the dialer software was buggy and frustrating, but I was able to make Windows dial in for me. If I took the adapter the nearest major town, Coos Bay Oregon, it jumped up to like 3.6mbps, with 400kb/s transfer rates!
Can't you get Verizon DSL for like $15 a month now?