The internet’s been around for a lot longer than most people think. Did you know, the first email was sent in the 1970s? It wasn’t exactly the kind of messaging we know today, but the technology has existed – initially for use by the military – for several decades. But it wasn’t until 1991 the internet went public, when Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, unveiled the World Wide Web, which gradually evolved into what we now see online.
Fibre optic broadband has made ‘superfast’ speeds available to more than two-thirds of the UK – to see you can get it, check your postcode – but in the web’s early days, you had to ‘dial’ a connection through a telephone line every time you wanted to use the internet. As well as being massively inconvenient, because you couldn’t be online and use the phone at the same time, it was also dreadfully slow.
Dial-up, as it was known, has since been consigned to the history books – except for in a very small number of places where faster services still aren’t available – and the average UK home broadband download speed (17.8Mb) makes dial-up’s maximum (56Kb) seem laughable. The difference is staggering. There are 1,000Kb in one Mb, which makes today’s typical download speed more than 300 times faster than what we used to rely on.
Everything changed in the year 2000, when Telewest launched the UK’s first ever asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) broadband service. It offered what, at the time, were probably thought of as unbelievably fast speeds, up to 30 times faster than 56k. As rival providers came along, increased competition brought a reduction in prices, and the next few years saw the country’s broadband network expand into millions of homes.
At the same time, the way we used the internet – and what we were using it for – began to change, with the arrival of the first social networking sites and peer-to-peer filesharing. It was the latter, made mainstream by P2P clients such as Napster – which had quite a run, Morpheus and Kazaa, which, in spite of its dubious legality, let ordinary households everywhere download MP3s and other files without paying a penny. This stimulated demand for ever-faster speeds.
More recently, with the rise of streaming, and services such as BBC iPlayer and Netflix, as well as the shift towards cloud computing – where photos, videos and documents are backed up online – there’s been a quantum leap in the amount of bandwidth we require. This is why fibre optic broadband has come along at just the right time to meet that demand. Speeds of over 30Mb, and up to 152Mb in some parts of the UK, make using the internet a joy.
For the first time in the history of broadband, futureproof internet connections are now available. These offer more than enough bandwidth for everyone in the household – with their many wireless gadgets – to be connected to the Wi-Fi at the same time, and stream, email, browse, download, Facebook and so on to their hearts’ content. And as the roll-out of fibre optic continues across the UK – 95% of the population will be able to get it by 2017 – the future’s looking good for everyone.
Photo: Danghongphuc
