The rise and rise of Home Broadband

Broadband internet connections have very much been the biggest technological innovation the field of home computing has experienced over the decade. Allowing us to be able to experience more services than ever before, it also has given prominence to the rise of the amount of companies offering us connections to what sometimes are connections not as fast as what is originally advertised.

Originally, internet service providers were more than willing to provide an unlimited and unrestricted service to their users. Partly because the amount of people who had broadband connections was much smaller than it is now, and also because there were less bandwidth demanding services available to users. An example of a website that was ahead of the curve but ultimately failed can be seen in the dot-com disaster story that was ‘boo.com’. The website had ambitions to become the online e-tailor of fashion, but did so in a way that was ineffective for users visiting the website at the time, who mostly did so by the way of a much slower dial-up connection instead of now common broadband ones. This meant that much of its fancy graphics and animations took far too long to load, resulting in a frustrating experience for prospective users.

Thankfully, the originally expensive subscription costs home broadband cost fell to levels that increased its desirability amongst consumers. Companies saw ever increasing subscription levels as the decade progressed, and saw a boom when TalkTalk introduced their offer of bundling a broadband service for free with their telephone packages, which was marketed as ‘free home broadband, for life’.

Other companies shortly followed suit, and before you knew it, the market for home broadband was saturated with a complex array of offers, some proving uneconomical to subscribers on expensive telephone plans or with hidden clauses that restricted how much they could download per month. Adding to the confusion was the use of terminology such as ‘speeds up to 20mbps’ or ‘unlimited (subject to a fair usage policy)’. These terms have mostly been used because of the nature of how ADSL works. The further away you are from your telephone exchange, the less likely you are to receive the maximum speed. This reason has become the main factor that many rural areas are unable to have broadband services provided to them because of their remote locations.

One technology that has proved effective in locations where the deployment of ADSL services is ineffective is the advent of mobile broadband. Since the introduction of 3G mobile services, mobile phone networks can now provide internet connections that can reach a minimum of 7mbps, rivalling some companies broadband offers. Unfortunately this is dependent on having a good quality signal in your area. It also is proving to be harder for mobile networks to offer unlimited services due to the amount of bandwidth their infrastructure can cope with.
With technology constantly evolving, it will be a hard job to try and innovate the sphere of internet technologies. The next big thing looks set to be the upgrading of existing copper wires to fibre optic cables, which will allow telecommunication companies to truly offer faster connections as well as an array of new services, such as television and on demand services through your telephone line.