Cheaper Broadband a reality?

BT’s new boss has announced that Broadband will be cheaper – does this mean you should get it?

Before we get any further, let’s define Broadband for the purpose of this article – it’s ADSL, Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line – the very fast (512k down, 256k up) internet connection.

If you caught the news this morning (Thursday 07/02/02) on the Beeb, you’d have heard BT’s new boss, Ben Verwaayen, pre-announcing cheaper Broadband – a price cut, in other words, on the technology that makes Web surfing and email much faster and more enjoyable.

Interestingly, that very price cut should filter through to just about every ADSL provider in the UK (outside Hull), since BT Ignite actually provides the wholesale version to other providers, such as AOL.

Pricing

Currently, prices for ADSL service (and here I’m only going to write about the basic Home service – the USB, 512k one) vary. AOL’s service comes in at £49.99 a month (go to keyword Broadband to learn more), while other ISPs are priced differently. What they’ve nearly all got in common, though, is that the service comes from BT.

Until we get the “official” announcement, though, we’ve no idea just how much the price will drop. I’m hoping that it will be the wholesale price that will change – as I imagine it will be – so that we do, indeed, see the drop filter through to every Broadband customer.

Worth it now?

Having read this far, you may well be wondering whether I consider ADSL to be worth it at its current price – whatever that happens to be with your preferred supplier. This simple answer is a resounding “yes” – let me tell you why.

Firstly, ADSL is an “always on” technology – and that means exactly what it says. Once you switch your PC on, ADSL comes up (assuming you make an initial access to the Internet, of course). That means that your use of the Internet is completely seamless. You could, for instance keep AOL running, minimised, and be alerted to email the moment it drops into your mailbox. I have AIM running 24/7 – it’s always there so that colleagues and other buddies can get to me immediately (if you’re not aware, AIM is the Instant Message service that runs outside of the AOL software).

Accessing a Web page is no problem – there’s no wait, other than for your browser to fire up, and, again, mine is constantly open and minimised, just to save a little time. I’ve also got shortcuts to Web sites on my desktop.

Next, you pay nothing whatsoever above your monthly ADSL subscription cost for time online – it’s a fixed price, unmetered. If you’re already using AOL’s unmetered tariff, you’ll know just how useful that is – you know there’s not going to be a nasty shock when the phone bill comes – well, not from Internet usage, anyway. I can’t predict voting patterns on Pop Idol! So, there’s no problem just popping onto the ‘net as and when you feel like it – and it soon becomes second nature.

Speeeeeed!

Next – it’s fast, and I mean fast. In the course of putting Practical PC together, I move huge quantities of data about the place. Often, I’ll need to download a large ZIP file for an application – and if I tell you that I’ve regularly seen speeds of 4 Megabytes per minute coming down the pipe, you’ll understand just how quick it can be.

To put it another way, a complete music CD, uncompressed, is 640MB – and it would take me just under 160 minutes to download it. More reasonably, a 27MB Internet Explorer update from Microsoft ends up on my hard disk in just under 7 minutes – just time to put the kettle on and brew a cuppa.

If I tell you that my data transfers (downloading) for yesterday and this morning until 9am total 418.8MB (which includes lots of Web sites, a few file transfers and a couple of MP3s grabbed) you can see that massive use is not too difficult to achieve – but I’d never be able to move that sort of quantity of data using a modem, at least, not comfortably.

For instance, the Internet Explorer upgrade would take closer to an hour and a half, even on a good modem connection.

When you consider that the AOL Broadband service includes your AOL subscription as well (worth £14.99 a month) you’re actually getting all of those high-speed advantages for around £35 a month – and spending that on phone bills would be easy.

Indeed, even if the price were not to drop, it’s a major bargain, in my opinion. I could not, now, go back to using a modem for my day-to-day Internet usage. Once you’ve had a week or two using ADSL, modems seem like a slug crawling through treacle.

So, would I recommend you go Broadband? I would. Certainly. You’ll find your Internet usage will change enormously, and all for the better. Go for it – and let’s hope the prices drop nicely for everybody as an added bonus!

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David Dorn