Which satellite provider do they have? From experience with my mothers rural living situation, Hughes net (DirecTV) service has degraded badly over the past few years, possibly due to oversubscription. She switched to WildBlue, and the difference in service is noticeable. Latency is still bad (due to the nature of using geosynchronous satellites), but the bandwidth is good enough for streaming services once they get past the latency issue. The downside is that not much streaming can be done, due to the bandwidth caps.

As far as other solutions, DSL was slowly being rolled out by various small companies in rural Colorado. And an old coworker of mine who lives in rural Texas outside Austin had some sort of 802.11 based wireless solution. I'll try to contact him to see what company he uses, to give you ideas there. Unfortunately I have a feeling the up front cost is going to require a business to be involved, one willing to put up the initial capitol to build it out, then recoup the costs over time with subscriptions.