Ask HN: Rural DSL or how to take advantage of the Universal Service Fund?

Since my father passed the duty of taking care of my mother's internet connectivity has fell to me. She lives in a rural area where she is apparently about 1,000 ft^2 too far away from the local DSLAM for DSL. Her only options seem to be 3G from Sprint (for some reason the signal from at&t and verizon isn't strong enough for connectivity) or satellite connectivity which is incredibly lag prone, and unreliable with heavy cloud coverage.

How are other people handling this? I know there's a federal fund for providing access to people in rural areas called the USF that anybody with a telephone or a cell phone pays into. Has anybody else had luck wielding this power to level-up connectivity in the sticks? Got any pointers?