Mike,

DSLreports has a couple of wisp forums and this link should give you a place to put your zip and see reviews of who is around:

http://www.dslreports.com/allreviews

It's sounds like you have cell1wireless.  From running our own wisp it can be a little tough sometimes. 

Some thoughts on wireless:

It's still low power radio and interference and weird antenna propagation issues can occur.  Also, depending on the company, they sometimes do a lot of selling and not as much 'service providing'.  It's tough to make any money in the wisp game (equipment cost, maintaining equipment, cost of bandwidth) and if the focus is tilted a little too much on roi, service (and roi) can suffer.  We also have customers that expect their own private T1 service for $35/month and that's just not practical.  With higher speeds, folks get spyware and viruses much faster and the result can be they end up being the top user while their computer appears to be slower than dialup (making sure you run spybot or similar and your AV software is more critical).  In a shared service there are also ball hogs to contend with and attempts to limit bandwidth can cause everyone's speed to go down.  Each company deals with this differently.  We were small enough that I could deal with it one on one (usually it was a virus), but now we will be installing a box to limit any ball hogs if the internet is being used heavy.

Satellite is a last option in most cases.  My experience is that it is expensive, goes down often and is not that fast.  If you have good line of site to your provider's access point and are not more than 5 miles away, you should be able to get good service.  Not all providers have a way to tell if you are up or down, so did you call right away when it went down on the 28th?  Have they given you anyway to monitor your signal level and throughput - for some of our more knowledgable customers that are having issues I've given them a way to log into to radio to look at the status (that way they know if it's our problem or something in their home).  I would say if it's a decent company and you work with them for at least 2 weeks (we don't charge the 1st 2 weeks because of 'teething problems') you will probably be happier in the long run.

Hope this helps,

Pat