Broadband Believers By David Nicholson

Demand for broadband services has soared during 2002, according to figures released by Oftel, with subscriber numbers more than doubling during the first six months of the year and continuing to grow strongly.

"This is a key step towards Broadband Britain," says e-commerce minister Stephen Timms. "Broadband no longer has to be a distant dream. We must now use this momentum to increase coverage and develop valuable, exciting content." So, if your company has not yet joined the broadband wagon, what do you need to bear in mind? First, there are several types of broadband offering: it can be delivered via cable or via fixed copper telephone lines; then, it can be either ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line), SDSL (symmetric DSL, meaning equally quick upload and download times) or VDSL (the V stands for very high bit rate) - a future technology which will be even quicker and more reliable than its predecessors.

Each of these products is a step on from the previous, and DSL in general is a step on from ISDN which allowed fast upload and download times from the Internet, but did not have the advantages of an always-on, fixed-cost service. With the arrival of SDSL, the technology is now challenging the recent domination of leased-line services for companies with heavy-duty connectivity needs.

The recent figures for UK broadband take-up are certainly encouraging, but they come after a couple of years' anxiety in the sector, where take-up had been very disappointing. Price was a serious issue, with initial set-up fees of ?400 or more, followed by ?300 a month (or more). Now that the monthly fee has dropped to the ?100 mark, so the technology is within reach of many businesses.

The technology's importance rests on several levels: download times with a dial-up modem connection are just too slow to make the Internet attractive for most people. So, doing business on the Internet would never properly take off using this technology, The example of boo.om was particularly apt: the company it's self had broadband technology and could browse through it's on-line clothes shops in seconds, but the graphics and other effects were so slow to download using a dial-up modem that the public was turned off.

Reliability needs to improve if e-commerce is to realise its potential in the UK. Companies which are trading on line cannot afford to have downtime or pages which just don't appear. Advanced DSL connections should give business users confidence in the reliability of the connection, enabling them to transfer more of their marketing and sales effort to on-line media.

There are also many kinds of business services which require end users to have large bandwidth to deliver maximum performance. Whether a company is selling business to business or business to consumer, the trick is to ensure, if your Web UK consultancy firm McKinsey recently published a report called 'Can Broadband Save Internet Media', in which many of the key issues are laid out. One of these is the survival of Web sites which depend on advertising for their revenue. On-line advertising has been in a poor state for the past 18 months, as companies failed to see the benefits.

McKinsey found that four types of Web site saw significantly higher visitor numbers with broadband access - music-streaming sites, casual games, TV promotions and reward & contest games. In fact, with music-streaming, the report reckons that, by 2005, 69 per cent of subscribers will be using broadband, with revenue rising at 32 per cent a year between now and then. On-line gaming also does well, with a 35 per cent increase after broadband introduction. be used to send videos of children to their grandparents, to download movies and play 'persistent-universe' games on line.

So, the business benefits to commerce are manyfold: more opportunities to conduct business on line, better conditions for an advertising model to appear on the Internet and less time spent looking for Web sites of any kind. So, what can individual ISPs offer? As Alistair Pooley, network operations manager at Star puts it: The advantage of installing broadband from us is that you will get many extra services. We offer security software systems and have a special security office, staffed 24 hours a day. We supply virus-scanning software and were the first ISP in the UK to supply SDSL: we had customers on line in December 2001."