Without broadband now I would still be stuck on 56k dialup which I had for 7 years and them 7 years were pure hell. I use the internet for hours everyday and speed is important as I don't want to have to wait ages for websites to load and downloads to finish.

In 2004 BT decided that Northern Ireland would get 100% broadband coverage and when I first heard the news I thought they can't be serious but yes.. my exchange got enabled in August 2004 and the first Internet Service Provider (ISP) that I joined was Freedom 2 Surf as I heard good comments about them and they were quite cheap at the time: £24.99 for 512k which you're probably thinking now.. wow that's expensive!

About a year later in August 2005 when my 12 months contract was complete I decided that I wanted to get a speed upgrade to 2mbit but F2S prices were quite expensive so I moved to PlusNet for alot less. Back then PlusNet were a good ISP who didn't have any port blocking, connection throttling or any hidden fair usage policy but now that's a different story with almost every ISP in the UK saying their service is unlimited but with a * saying fair usage policy but sometimes it never actually says what their limit is without asking them direct.

I have been with a good lot of ISP's since 2004 and have created a table to remind me what they used to be like. You can view them in the Broadband ISP's page. I also rate what I thought about them at the time, which doesn't reflect what they are like now.

A new kind of technology came about in April 2006 when almost every exchange in the United Kingdom was up to 8mbit enabled or maxdsl some people call it. This meant that you could get any speed up to 8mbit but depending on line conditions like how far away you are from the exchange and your noise margin this would drop.

I, myself live approx 3km from the local exchange and my line attenuation is about 50db. I usually sync around 3300 to 3900 depending on what time of day it is and the weather situation. This brings me to another point which is called IP profile.. which is slightly complicated at first. An IP profile is basically levels of speed which your local exchange holds depending on your sync rate. If I was synced at 3300 then my IP profile would be 2500 which is roughly about 300KB/sec. If I was synced at 3500 then my IP profile would be 300 and I would achieve roughly 370KB/sec. It can take up to 3 days for your IP profile to change aswell which can be annoying especially if your router resynced very low due to bad weather for instance.

I do kind of miss the old fixed speeds because you didn't have to worry about your sync dropping or your IP profile changing but fixed speeds only go up to 2mbit and if you can get faster then it's probably best to be on maxdsl.

Lately I'm syncing about 3300 to 4050.. it seems to vary an awful lot and when it comes with night, my noise margin drops really low and sometimes causes me to resync back down again, I have yet to work out why.

Our house is the last house on the phoneline for this road, which is quite disappointing but that's the way it goes.. I live approximity 3km from the exchange and to be honest as long as I have speeds over 2mbit, I'm not going to complain.

As the years move on we should see faster broadband speeds and it shouldn't be too long before ADSL2+ comes.