I have had DSL for about 7 years now, but I've never considered it to be slow (1.5MB download back in 2000, but I'm getting 3MB download now.) I spend about $35/month on it.
I won't chime in TOO much on who to use or who to avoid. There are going to be horror stories about every single provider out there, so...
One thing I would avoid is satellite based broadband. They might advertise their speeds, but they don't typically talk about LATENCY. You might get great download speeds, but it takes a non-negligible amount of time to bounce your "please download this" signal off a satellite, back to earth, initiate the transfer of data back up to the satellite and finally back to your computer on earth.
The latency might not matter to you, but if you play games or use any on-line applications that require low latency, the dish-based broadband might be a pain in the butt for you.
