Until the year 2000, the typical UK household connected to the Internet through a dial-up modem with connection speeds of no more than 56Kb (kilobits) per second. While these connections were fast enough to allow users to browse the Internet, they fell short of allowing the sort of data transfer capacity necessary to download music and video at anything but frustratingly low speeds. It wouldn't be until cheap, fast broadband was introduced that downloading large amounts of data became viable.

Before we go on let's just clear something up. The speed of your Internet connection is measured in 'bits' - single digits of binary code (i.e. 110100101101= 12 bits of data). So, a 56Kbps modem can download a maximum of 56,000 'bits' every second. Confusingly, though, when you download data from the Internet (in the form of MP3 music files, for example), these files are often measured in 'bytes' - groups of 8 'bits'. So, a 5MB (Megabyte) file is actually 40Mb (Megabits) in size.

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Before fast broadband providers were available in the UK, you could expect to be able to download a 5MB song in no less than twelve minutes, even if you achieved the maximum speed of your modem (a very rare event). In 2000, high-speed broadband was introduced commercially to the UK, and suddenly home users had access to speeds of up to 256Kbps - almost five times the speed of the old dial-up connections - allowing people to download that 5MB song in less than three minutes. Finally, we had the technology to download a song in less time than it took to play it.

Since 2000, broadband technology has moved ahead in leaps and bounds. Telephone exchanges across the UK have been retrofitted to enable the use of broadband, and today almost every home is able to connect if they wish. Today we have even moved on beyond the 256Kbps connections. Many broadband providers such as BT broadband, AOL broadband and Be broadband now offer connection speeds upto 24Mbps.

These tremendous increases in our capacity to transfer data have led to new uses for the Internet. As well as downloading small music files we can now download entire movies and TV programs, files so big that just five years ago they would have taken days or even weeks to download. We now have the capacity, in fact, to stream high-quality video to our computers - allowing us to watch as we download. Online communities such as YouTube offer instant access to video files that play at the click of a mouse.

In short cheap, fast broadband has allowed Internet users to move far beyond text. We're now discovering a whole new Internet - one in which we can find more than just information. The new Internet promises much, much more, and there's still more to come.

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