The evolution of home and business broadband speeds in Britain

While broadband internet is very common today, it is only in the last few years that most businesses and households in the UK have been able to boast fast and stable internet connections. In the earliest days of the world wide web, the vast majority of people connected via dial up modems that were much, much slower than even the cheapest broadband connections today. But even modern connection speeds may soon seem antiquated with the raw power that upcoming communications technology promise.

For most internet early adopters in the late 1990s and early 2000s, their first experience of connecting to the web was likely via a dial-up modem. These early analogue modems connected by dialling a telephone number at the internet service providers which allowed access to the internet. Dial-up modems were slow by today’s standards – most modems during the mid-1990s could only transfer a maximum of 33 kilobits of data, reaching 56k later in the decade. Because they connected to the same telephone socket it was usually not possible to use the internet and make a telephone call at the same time. The first major advance for home and small business customers in the late 1990s was ISDN, a faster solution which effectively used two telephone lines to achieve greater connection speeds and allow users to go online and use the phone at the same time. ISDN offered speeds of up to 128k, allowing users to download data at a much faster rate. ISDN often involved paying for two phone lines and doubled data charges (internet connections were often charged by the minute at the time) making it prohibitively expensive for many home users but it proved very popular in business where the increased bandwidth and ability to talk and surf at the same time was invaluable. While larger companies took advantage of the costly T1 and T3 connections that were first developed with academic networks in mind, small businesses and domestic users had to wait until well after the turn of the millennium and ADSL and cable broadband for the first real advance over dial-up. Early ADSL connections offered consistent download speeds of up to 512k and it wasn’t long until 1Mb and 2Mb services were available. By the second half of the decade, speeds of 8Mb had become fairly commonplace and new technologies such as LLU were able to boost speeds to up to 20 or even 24Mb. ADSL and cable connections helped to make speedy home and fast business broadband connections a realities for millions of users in Britain yet current day and future technology promises further speed increases to come. With fibre optic connections now going up to 100Mb – nearly 2000 times the speed of a 56k modem – in parts of the UK and fibre-to-the-cabinet connections capable of further boosting existing copper wire lines just over the horizon, the fast connections of today may soon seem slow and archaic in just a few years. Daniel Collins writes for a digital marketing agency. This article has been commissioned by a client. This article is not designed to promote, but should be considered professional content.

Related Articles –
fast business broadband, broadband internet, broadband internet speeds, cheapest broadband connections,

Email this Article to a Friend!
Receive Articles like this one direct to your email box!Subscribe for free today!