1.5Mb DSL $3,355 per month (gulp)

Think your internet access is expensive, think yourself fortunate...

Most users (and only four percent of the country even has access) hook up through state-owned Kazakhtelecom, a company not concerned with competitive pricing for its services. An unlimited dial-up plan costs about €82 ($111) in a country where the average monthly wage is €292 ($399). As for DSL, an unlimited 1.5Mbps connection costs €2,458 ($3,355) a month, and doesn't even included the required ADSL modem. Want a 6Mbps cable connection? It'll cost you, to the tune of €16,144 ($22,032) a month. As the OSCE report drily notes, this is more than a thousand times the price of such a connection in Western Europe.

  

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070727-the-internet-in-kazakhstan-welcome-to-the-land-of-3355-per-month-dsl.html

*crosses Kazakhstan off list of places to retire*

But at least for your money you get the chance to see what the nation's prisons look like from the inside:   

Bloggers who have published items critical of the government have been charged under statutes that prohibit any violations of the president's "honor and dignity." In 2003, a journalist complained that one of his favorite web sites was being blocked. According to the report, "the prosecutor opened a criminal case against him for compromising the security system of Kazakhtelecom. He was beaten, sentenced and sent behind bars."

As that last example indicates, content filtering is alive and well in the country. For several years, the preferred method of blocking was apparently by IP address, but that came to an end in 2005. The method of choice is now "increasing the connection latency" so that undesirable sites take so long to load that users give up.