I only intend this opinion to cover the options available, using my own experience as a previous dial-up and subsequently as a broadband customer for background. What it is NOT, is an endorsement of one company’s service.
WHAT’S AVALABLE?
Basically, there are two main types of broadband service. Probably the most common is ADSL, the Asymmetric Digital Services Line, so called because its download speed is faster than its upload speed, hence ‘asymmetric’. They worked out a while back, that unless you run an Internet server from home, a slower upload speed was of little consequence, except for e-mail file attachments (and pictures for Ciao opinions!).
Secondly, you can also get service through a cable TV supplier, limited normally to NTL and Telewest. Despite the difference in medium, this is still asymmetric. For example, my Telewest soon-to-be-upgraded 1.5 mbit broadband 'only' has a 256kbit upload speed.
There are one or two other means, one of which is to have incoming broadband via satellite, whilst the upload side remains firmly analogue via your telephone line – you’d need a proper up-link dish to be able to make this a two-way process, quite possibly several yards across! That would give the planners down at the Civic Centre something to get their teeth into!
CAN I GET IT?
The basic problem is that both Cable TV providers and ADSL providers tend to serve the same part of the population, i.e. those either in an urban environment, or at least those who live within so many kilometres of an ADSL equipped exchange. Basically, as far as they are concerned, if you live in the middle of nowhere, AND miles from an exchange, you’re no concern of theirs. It’s always been the same with emerging technology – to kick your service into profitability as quickly as possible, you aim for population centres. Don’t forget, there are people in valleys that can’t even get analogue TV yet, let alone digital, and remember how long it took before cell-phone coverage stretched beyond London/Birmingham and motorways.
GETTING ADSL – Firstly, ADSL requires that you have a BT (unless in Hull) line, even if you make your calls via another means. Then you have to ascertain whether your local exchange is equipped for ADSL. Most of the ISPs, Freeserve for example, have an exchange checker on their websites. If this ‘OKs’ your initial check, fine. As a poor relation, it may also come back and give you a date for when BT estimate to have the exchange equipped, or, if you’re REALLY unlucky, you may get the news that your exchange is waiting for its economic threshold to be crossed. This effectively means that BT needs to see a big enough statement of intent from users (500 I think) to make it worth their while – think if it as getting a petition up.
Then, having not fallen at the first or second fences, comes the ‘Canal Turn’ of this particular National event; establishing whether you are ‘within limits’ vis-à-vis distance from the exchange. If you only need the basic 512kbit service, then a 5.
5 kilometres limit applies coming down to 3.5 for those that need faster access up to 2mbit for example. Even this 3.5 kilometre limit covers about 85% of the known telephone users.
However, if you get knocked back at this stage don’t despair. My next-door neighbour was told that his house checked out as ‘5 metres outside limits’, which would put my gable end 10 metres outside! Not prepared to take no for an answer, he bashed on the ‘door’ of the MD of BT Ignite or whatever they were calling themselves last year, and demanded a proper ‘end-to-end’ test, which proved to be OK. The fact that he then got Telewest cable to install broadband instead is neither here nor there!
GETTING CABLE – This is not quite such a minefield. You either have it or you don’t, and if you don’t, there’s no point whatsoever in getting up a petition. If you are not sure, check the pavement outside. Are there any manhole (personhole?) covers marked CATV? Have any cabinets appeared on the pavement, which clearly don’t belong to BT? These are all clues.
Signing up for cable is pretty easy. You only need to peruse the websites for Telewest and NTL to find which one serves your area using their postcode checker. So confident are they that they don’t overlap, that they each refer you to the other’s site if the search is unsuccessful.
Incidentally, don’t assume that the presence of cable TV MUST mean broadband exists too. I tried this on behalf of a friend in North Ealing, London W5, and although she could have cable TV from NTL, telephone and broadband weren’t to be had (yet).
INSTALLATION
Cable is easy – you get them to do it, for a fee of course. In my case, this was my very first (and only, to date) Telewest service. I had to get them to do the lot, including running the cable all the way through the street duct from the corner of my road. For some obscure reason, I half imagined that the wires were already there, but no, it was just the pipe all the time! For my £70, I got three installers for two hours, two hundred yards of cable pulled through, a modem and a PC network card – no wonder that Telewest and NTL are struggling.
ADSL installation comes in a variety of flavours, including DIY kits. Of course, you don’t go down to the exchange and equip it yourself, but once you get the e-mail go-ahead from your chosen ISP to confirm that the exchange is ready, you can install the kit supplied, usually a modem with a USB connection. I don’t like these, favouring one with a ‘proper’ connection to a network card in your PC – I’ll come onto why later. The one DIY installation I’ve sat in on went like clockwork, so I’ve no axes to grind there, but you do have to put filters in between the socket and any speech telephones that you are using on your line. These are designed to stop the ADSL and analogue speech line from interfering with each other. The ISP will normally give you a miserly ONE or perhaps two of these, leaving you to buy more at around a fiver each.
SPEEDS?
These vary, along with the price.
I notice that Tiscali and NTL Cable actually offer a ‘bargain basement’, 128kbit service, still loosely labelled broadband, but I’d argue that ‘midband’ is a better name for these, since even Home Highway ISDN can be used at 128Kbits.. However, there’s no denying that they are markedly faster than dial-up, and anyway, a mere speed comparison denies the other advantages of an ‘always on’ connection.
My own Telewest Blueyonder cable broadband is a 1.5 mbit ‘pipe’, which as from December 2004 is to run at 2.0 mbit costing me £35/month, having been reduced in price twice in the last 6 months. It would be £5 cheaper still if I had any other Telewest services, like phone or TV. At typical 512kbit broadband service should be in the £20-30 region, going by most ads I’ve seen.
DOES IT PAY?
Well, yes and no really. It depends on where you’re coming from. I was a 24/7 dial-up user paying Freeserve to use an 0800 number, so at least my calls were free. This cost me about £15/month, and used my existing telephone line, which was forever engaged as a result – oh bliss! Therefore taking on something at twice the price (£30/month for 512kbits) took a bit of justifying with ‘the management’.
If however, you are also renting a separate line for your Internet usage, then the cost of line rental plus, say, Freeserve’s charges for a 56kbit dial-up service come pretty damned close to renting ADSL/Cable 512kbit instead. Some friends of mine were renting an extra (cable) telephone line for £11/month, paying for £7’s worth of calls to an 0845 number AND a £6/month fee to Virgin.net. Given that their new Telewest 512kbit broadband will cost them £23/month from next month, changing was the best thing I ever advised them to do! Ten times faster AND a tad cheaper.
USING IT
Of course, whether it pays or not, broadband has its other delights. For one thing, it’s always there.
Your virus checker will just take it upon itself to contact the home site and download the updates needed to keep your machine clean.
The seemingly never-ending stream of tweaks and security improvements from Microsoft just sort of ‘happen’ leaving you just to OK a few dialogue boxes.
Music downloads sometimes happen so fast you can start playing them before you’ve got them all!
What I like most about broadband is the fact that using the Internet is no longer an event. If I’m writing to a DVD these days, which was always an operation your were advised not to jeopardise by other PC activity, a bit of surfing never seems to go amiss.
The other thing that all that luvverly band-width gives you is…..
THE ABILITY TO SHARE THE CONNECTION
If you have more than one PC, they could all use the broadband connection. You probably wouldn’t even notice it running any slower, since the PCs are very unlikely to contend with each other. That is to say, that unless both are downloading something big at the same time, there is very little chance of a clash. Think of it as maximising your bangs-per-buck from the circuit rental.
This is why I said earlier that I’m no fan of USB connection modems.
You CAN leave this connected to the principal PC, but you need to leave it running for any other PCs to be able to use the Internet. Far better is to introduce a DSL/Cable Router into the ‘daisy-chain’, which will not only act as a firewall, but also provide for each PCs network requirements. My own Linksys Router & Wireless Access Point can handle four PCs if physically wired to it, plus another larger set of wireless PCs. However, all these connections (except the wireless link) are made with ‘proper’ LAN cabling and ‘proper’ network cards in the PCs. Generally speaking, routers are made to handle networks, not USB connections. The other knock-on benefit is that all PCs can use the same printers and share file access, so that, for example, you only have one main location for ‘My Documents’.
WHAT IF I’VE GOT A CHOICE?
Well lucky old you, near to an ADSL-equipped exchange AND in a cable TV area?
If it were me, I’d go for Cable Broadband. Not for any technical reason, but the old ‘all your eggs in one basket’ reason.
Think of it – your ADSL service stops working. On checking if your phone works, that’s out too; probably a cable break (maybe Telewest’s contractor digging up the road to install cable TV – no that would be just TOO cruel) or some other disconnection. So you have to resort to someone else’s phone or a mobile to report both out of order.
Alternatively, you come home and your cable broadband isn’t working. You use your (working) BT/Hull phone to call Telewest/NTL and chew their ears off. Likewise, you come home to find your phone dead, but your cable broadband working. What do you do? You get straight onto BT’s website, and report the fault, that’s what you do!
Likewise, if speed counts, it seems in the past couple of years, that cable broadband is always quicker to launch a faster service. Conversely, I’m not aware of any instances where ADSL has ‘leap-frogged’ cable. Some lucky Telewest residential customers will be enjoying 4.0 mbit by next month.
SURELY IT CAN’T BE ALL PROS AND NO CONS?
No you’re right. Once you have a permanent connection, you must take security much more seriously. You are much more likely to pick up a virus if you are ‘open to infection’ more often. Likewise, ‘fire-walling’ is highly desirable too. When you dial up, you usually get a different Internet address (IP address) each time, as it’s very unlikely that you’d pick up the same ISP modem and circuit twice in a row. With a broadband connection, you tend to get the same IP address for weeks on end, if not permanently. I think the only time mine has changed in two and a half years is when I went to Oz for five weeks. Having a semi-permanent IP address can give those naughty ne’er-do-wells that scan the web for a nice juicy c:drive to snoop around longer to break into your PC, and makes it more likely that they’ll be back. Much better to be behind a fire-wall that gives you total ‘stealth’ protection with the added satisfaction that you are cocking up their scanner by making it wait for a reply that it won’t get.
Think of it like this. In most streets where some of the houses have burglar alarms, however ineffective they really are, statistically, it’s the houses without one, which get robbed.
Broadband - The Internet Comes Of Age 
