I live in Moscow, Russia, and recently I've switched to a different Internet provider. The new one is called Corbina (home.corbina.ru - Russian language, sorry). To connect from a Windows machine one uses the following procedure:
a) provider gives you an Ethernet cable in your flat. You set up a connection using DHCP with no specific settings and get on the provider's internal LAN (with addresses 10.*). At this stage you can use internal LAN resources (mostly users' FTP servers, some game servers, etc) for free at 100Mbit speed.
b) to connect to the Internet you have to set up a PPTP connection to the provider's gateway using the LAN connection established on the previous step. The details are shown at
http://help.corbina.ru/nominee/help/...pn/vpn_xp.html, they are in Russian, but screenshots are pretty simple and, in fact, there are only three details that should be noted: a) the PPTP connection is made with a host vpn.corbina.net, b) provider assigns a "real" dynamic IP address at this step, c) the encryption is disabled. This PPTP connection gives you the access to the Internet with the bandwidth you paid for.