Anyone thinking of upgrading their internet connection from dial-up to broadband will be faced with a bewildering array of choices. Should you select BT Total broadband or Sky broadband, TalkTalk broadband or Tiscali broadband? Then again, there’s Think broadband, O2 broadband, Tesco Broadband and Plusnet broadband, not to mention Orange home broadband and Be broadband. So, faced with options like these, just which way do you turn?
The chief reason for switching is that broadband is incomparably faster than dial-up, and it doesn’t disrupt telephone use (with dial up, if someone’s using the internet, no one can use the phone). Dial-up plods along sedately at 56 kilobits per second whilst broadband turbo-zaps at rates as high as 768 kilobits (although technically, any rate exceeding 256 kilobits per second is considered to be broadband).
A 56K dial-up connection will load a typical web page in around 14 seconds whilst a 256K broadband connection will do it in three; a five minute song will take 14 minutes to download via dial up compared to broadband’s three minutes. If the broadband connection moves to the top of the quality range (eight Megabytes presently) web pages load instantaneously and the music download will take about 2.5 seconds. The higher the rate, the more expensive the monthly fee, generally.
The simple answer is to consider three points: mobile broadband availability in your area, how often you use the internet (and what for), and the maximum speed of the broadband services on offer. One thing’s for certain, once you’ve adjusted to the Jenson Button Formula One speeds of broadband, you’ll never want to return to the Miss Marple’s bicycle of dial up.