Similar problem:
Have 2 friends in rural America where coax coverage is sparse. One tried satellite (Hughes) - miserable - switched to Verizon and has that WiFi through her home - but can't get online with TC - am working with her to use iwconfig wlan0 ESSID "HerHotSpot" key HerWEPkey - maybe working here shortly - we shall see
Then the DSL problem - similar to this issue - gent in the middle of "Nowhere Texas" - on a phone line hit to a DSL modem - Windows 7 completely wiped out due to a virus that hit him in under 3 minutes of going online (figures) - pretty sad but hey - that's Windows - so I said "Well, can you cripple a download?" - he did - and we got a USB with syslinux booting TC - he has wbar working - but his eth0 is dead even when plugged direct into DSL modem - and he has wifi through his home - but wireless tools isn't talking to his antennas...so we figured we'd continue down the DSL direct connect path for now.
The objective: lots of folks outside of cities have either satellite or DSL - no coax - or Verizon / Metro / T-Mobile / Sprint cell phone styled internet/wifi, so the market segment for these is rather large and dire if we want to get TC into rural America.
UPDATE: My tests with eth0 today (in urban area - std Comcast cable/coax to a router to a switch/hub to the laptop) - were perfect - as in connected automatically with no scripts or a single command. Was able to kill udhcpc job and ifconfig eth0 down, then toggle it back up and restart udhcpc and it connected instantly.
Will try similar test with rural Texas tomorrow eth0 cabled directly to DSL, then try their WiFi (may have driver issues - new Acer laptop), and then the Verizon eth0 and related WiFi. Both these sites reported trouble before using the Tools/Network utility, but I didn't even have to use that today for my test - poof - working instantly/automatically. Not sure what their problem was...will find out.
As for "rural" objective, while saturation is thin, a lot of folks I've met are getting away from "at-home" cable hits and leaning towards mobile aka Verizon cell/dongle WiFi, so ensuring drivers are working may be of some importance and the WiFi drivers for some of the newer laptops don't seem to be as reliable as my older RealTek 8187 - which worked right away.
UPDATE #2: Not sure why ETH0 won't recognize at all. Tried sudo ifconfig eth0 up - nothing - no device - but Windows sees it fine
we get a DUMMY0 and LO - no eth or wlan
So before worrying about PPPOE or any other method, going to try to figure out why a brand new laptop running TC can't find its various holes
Checked bios - worthless - barely mentions hard drives - no PnP settings or ETH or SERIAL - etc. - does allow boot priorities to include USB HDD so that was a plus
Checked dmesg - a lot of squawking about 64 CACHE this and that - didn't know what to look for to verify if it sees an ETH0 port
So.....next step....try to safe mode boot his Windows (sad that TC can't do this - hate bill gates ANY-OS) and get under the massive virus-infected (pray) get to the internet (pray again) and try to download some extensions.
Also noticed that some DEPs have changed and files that work fine on my machine do not work on his. I used std wgets - he used the AppBrowser gui - and his dont work?
?? Kinda funny that one.