BTW, perhaps a satellite broadband service would be a suitable option here? There may also be an operator in your area offering fixed wireless broadband (via tower/high site) perhaps. A bit of googling may be needed.

A lot of these usb sticks are the same and are sold under 100 different company names. You need the chipset to tell where we are at. As in other post, lsusb on this modem.

It looks like some country towns have that but I cannot find anything of that nature around my own area despite the fact that I am fully aware that it could be the only solution and I have spent not hours but days to try to locate one, "googling" for anything I could think of. It looks like the big players like Telstra and Optus, form which all the others probably depend, have been allowed by our politicians to create and maintain "duopolies".

What about bordernet or ipstar for satellite-based services?

Having had a lot of difficulties to find an Internet "home-line" is impossible in my area, I wrongly assumed any solution was going to be complicated but this is not the case with mobile broadband, in fact it was very easy.
I read a few suppliers were relying on Vodafone to supply a plan and Vodafone had a shop in the nearest town (60k away) so I visited that shop and got mobile broadband on a $AU30/10GB/month 12month plan (the $AU15/4GB/month could have been sufficient for me if I do not need to download a distro) and it works so well that, so far, I could not tell the difference in speed and reliability between it and a $AU60/month home-line plan I had about a year ago. And I did not need to buy a phone - no other cost involved.
The "modem" (pocketwifi R216H) worked out-of-the-box in Debian 7.

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That's great news to read.