Log on to the revolution
Telegraph "Broadband Horizons" supplement
Published on Friday February 23, 2007
With so much now available online, it’s a shame to be cramped by a slow connection. Time to move into the fast lane, says Chris Alden
It’s one of the truisms of the modern age that as the technology gets better, so we think of ever faster and smarter ways to consume it.
The arrival of the motorway in Britain, for example, heralded the introduction of ever bigger lorries to move our goods from city to city. It didn’t do much for the countryside around Newport Pagnell, but it made a doddle of getting an avocado from Dover to Glasgow.
But try driving a modern supermarket lorry down a single-track country lane in Devon, and you’ll soon notice the difference the passing of time makes. Your only option is to unload the lorry, divide the load into several smaller vehicles – or risk the wrath of an angry dry-stone waller.
And that’s not unlike the experience of trying to listen to an audio file on the internet when you’ve got a dial-up internet connection. Those annoying moments when the computer is “buffering” are really the computer unpacking the file into smaller pieces so that it can finish the job. The result? You wait longer, and the file doesn’t arrive all in one go. Most frustrating if you’re wondering whether that shot from Lomana LuaLua was destined for the top corner of the goal or the top corner of the stand.
As ever more people in Britain adopt high-speed internet access – 12.2 million households and small businesses at last count, for the second quarter of 2006 – so the load on our internet infrastructure gets bigger. People are getting used to audio and video on demand, internet telephony, the power to send and receive large files such as photos and computer programs, and the ability to publish dynamic content to the web as well as read it.
The only trouble with that is that if you’re still trying to access the internet with the same dial-up connection that just about did the job a few years ago, you’re going to struggle – just like that container lorry in Devon.
Happily, the overwhelming majority of the population now have the opportunity to get connected to high-speed broadband. So if you’re still struggling along with dial-up, have never connected to the internet before, or are just thinking of switching, this supplement is designed to help you work out whether broadband is for you, what kind of connection you are likely to want, and where to go for impartial advice.
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