<--- 3G Wireless Internet in a Rural area.
Here are my experiences:
There are local phone companies in most areas which will allows you to avoid the big name phone companies which put a cap on your download, etc. Look for them, ask around the area, someone will know something about it.
I have $25 a month, 1.5mb connection with no download caps. The router plus external mounted attena (which they installed) was $450 though.
My issue has been this: The closest tower is about 6-7 miles away. My DBM with the attena is about -85 (which is bad signal). I'd think the DBM you need for solid gaming would be = -75 to -65 (I believe the best signal is -45.) The problem is that when you have a bad DBM the 3G signal has to retry and retransmit bad packets, which causes fluxuation with the pings.
The internet service has been really choppy. And for some reason in the summer the quality is horrible. I'm not sure if it's the heat, the haze, the humidity, not sure, but for whatever reason my ping is about 1500ms-5000ms. In the winter months it's pretty steady between 150ms and 300ms, and most games are playable.
To give you the experience of typical gaming gameplay. Take Team Fortress 2 for example (in the winter months) I will be able to play for 20 seconds just fine. Then it will pause for about a seconds as I lag out, and repeat for the entire play session. It's pretty constant. It's almost there but not perfect. MMO's are easier as it's not so critical if you lag for a second or two. Even though I wouldn't want to play a healer in a raid.
But when it comes summer, I have probably a 25% chance that any sort of gaming is going to work, even with a huge ping. If I'm downloading this is what it will do: Lag for about 15 seconds, then for a second it will transfer at 500k/s. Then lag for 15 seconds, then 500k/s. I believe it's because I finally got the corrupt packet across the line and there were a few in the buffer already completed. Hard to say with TCPIP, but as you can tell, that is not going to work for gaming.
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I'd personally take a cell phone (verizon or whatever if that is the company) and have it display the DBM and drive to the place you are considering buying and get an idea of quality of the signal (do not use the bars as an indicator, black berries for example need to go into options/status to see the DBM.) If it's between -100 dbm and -75 dbm, I'd avoid that location if you want any gaming. If you get an attena like me, it will only improve it by about 10 dbm. So if the area was -95dbm on your phone (like mine was) the attena will only bring you down to about -85dbm.
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Edit: I did try out Team Mobile with a USB cell device, as they have a tower about 3 miles away, so I thought that would work better. It did have a better ping, but the max speed was about 12K/s on transfers. Twice the speed of dialup. And with 5 gig a month limit, I had no choice but to return it. In the weekend I had it, I already used up over a gig.
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