BT has offered to open up its network to its rivals, and reduce the fees it charges its rivals for wholesale broadband access by around 8%. Actually, the company had little choice but to make these concessions, since it faced a break-up of its business if it didn't introduce more competition into the market for domestic landlines. Also, to meet the growing demand for greater bandwidth, BT will make super-fast broadband more widely available.
What's more, according to Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, six million people now have broadband access at home, which is more than the number using dial-up accounts. All but a few of the UK's households have can broadband access via standard phone lines or fibre-optic cable services. In addition, remote areas can be covered by wireless or satellite services.
Roughly two-thirds of broadband users use ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) services, which rely on standard phone lines. The majority of the remainder are customers of cable firms NTL, Telewest and Kingston Communications, with only a few thousand people using satellite or wireless connections.
The great joy of broadband is that you can leave it on permanently if you wish, because there are no extra call charges to pay. Furthermore, you can make telephone calls while surfing, as the two signals share the same line but do not interfere with each other. What's more, users of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) packages such as Skype can make absolutely free user-to-user calls over the Internet, as this article explains.
Most broadband users have a 512k connection speed (short for 512 kilobits per second), which is about ten times as fast as a 56k dial-up service. However, more and more ISPs (Internet Service Providers) offer 1Mbps (megabits per second), 2Mbps, 4Mbps or even 8Mbps access to their customers. These ultra-fast broadband services dramatically speed up the downloading of web pages, music and video files - and make online gaming even more responsive.
When I moved house last year, I switched from BT Yahoo's 512k service, costing £26.99 a month, to a "two meg" service for £15 a month. In other words, my new service is four times faster, but saves me £144 a year (£94 in the first year, after accounting for the £50 installation fee)! I used the excellent ADSLguide website to find my new provider, Prodigy Networks, with which I'm completely delighted.
However, there is a small catch with my fast-yet-cheap new ADSL: it is "metered", so there's a limit as to how much data I can download and upload in a given month. If I go over my monthly limit of 2Gb (two gigabytes, about the same amount of data as can be stored on three CDs), I have to pay £1.50 per extra gigabyte. I'm happy to pay as I go for such an excellent service, but you may decide to choose an unmetered or unrestricted tariff if you plan to download a lot of large files, such as music or video clips.
To help you to get faster web access for less, here are ADSLguide's comparison tables for the cost of 512k, 1Mb and 2Mb services. Before you switch, make sure that you've checked out your new provider's:
-
contention ratio (how many people share your bandwidth locally?);
-
customer service (do you have to call a premium-rate number for customer services or technical support helplines?);
-
reliability statistics (how do users rate its reliability, and how does this compare with other ISP's ratings?); and
-
extra services (are email accounts and personal web space included in the package?).
Finally, when switching to my new ADSL service, I also bought a wireless modem router, which broadcasts my ADSL signal to a receiver connected to my PC. Thus, I can now access the Internet from anywhere in my home (and even outdoors) without wires - and multiple PCs can access the web at the same time, which is awesome!
More: Better Deals For Broadband.
