>You are not obligated to have a landline.  The goverment requires phone
>service to have landline capability.  That means that it must have 99.999%
>uptime and must supply its own power in the case of a power outage.  I
>believe that it must maintain power for 24 hour.

Actually, if you make a little device which takes its power from the phone
line, and you get caught, the phone company can take you to court for
stealing electricity.  I was reading about it last week somewhere.

Anyway, wireless.....  The only two places I know of here in town that offer
wireless are Implex.net and baldeagle.net.  I'm 8 miles from downtown MPLS,
and with a 10 foot telescoping antenna, I have line of sight view.
Apparently the equipment that implex uses has a range of 14 miles, and it's
directional 802.11.  However, they get you with the $1500 install charge.  I
think Implex actually farms out the equipment install and everything to some
other company.  They simply pay for the connection to the Antenna on top of
the Pillsbury building, and this other company charges them to set it all
up.  They give him a cut of the monthly charge and it's all good.  If
Real-time wanted to get involved, they could probably do some sneaky
inquiries and get the installer to call them and then try to work a deal.
:)

I really really want to be able to keep my machines at my house to serve out
my personal site and stuff, I have to get something done fast because I have
to move soon.  But damn, $1500 for install is a bit steep.  It's $400 a
month for 512kbps also.  For double that, you could have a full T1 with a
whole class C.  I've got a cable modem coming next week just in case I don't
find something, and I'll probably just end up monitoring where they scan me
from to see if I'm running servers, then block their IP's and run a server
anyway.  :)  Of course, if they do an Xmas scan, they'll still be able to
see if the port is open or not if I'm using a linux firewall, Doh.  

If anyone has a big fat connection, and wants to experiment with some
directional 802.11, and is willing to give me a few ip's, I'd be happy to
help (in the name of science of course). :)

Jay