At least you had the option to go with cable. Until August last year my options were dial-up; various flavours of ADSL or 3G/4G. I managed for a few years on ADSL 2+ theoretically up to 25 Mbps if you were within a kilometre of the telephone exchange. I'm 2.5 km out and ADSL 2+ drops off sharply beyond 2 km. Best I ever got was 10.5 down & 1.1 up. Between 2005 & 2012 I was on ADSL 1, getting 1.3 Mbps down & 250 Kbps up.

I'm now on a FTTN with the node being 140 metres of phone cable away from my place. I pay for 25 Mbps down/5 Mbps up and generally get 94% of those rates.

//