This was rural though, with the cell tower serving a small town, population 600, and folks on the highway and in the nearby backcountry. As far as we could tell it really was 128kbps. But definitely not enough for the modern (then - this is already 7-8 years ago) web.
We ran out the (then) measly data allotment of the day (500MB) on purpose on the last day of the billing period to try this.