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Yes, you can now download movie videos. Entire albums of your favourite songs are waiting to be played on your computer. Your photos are waiting to be uploaded, sharer and blogged. There are high definitions wallpapers showing underwater sea life with amazing clarity that you want to download. You want to have a little chit- chat with your grandma sitting by the beach in Australia. Fortunately, technology makes all of this possible- but without a solid, uninterrupted broadband connection, trying all these tech- savvy things end up in a very frustrating experience. This explains why the Office of National Statistics (ONS) revealed over 88% of internet users in the UK opting for broadband connection rather than dial up.

Choosing the right broadband service for your needs is a matter of much importance. There are several factors to consider while making this decision. Does the speed offered by your broadband service provide apt for your needs? If you use the net to surf the web and read news websites, a lower speed might suffice. On the other hand, if the 5 second 'Buffering...' interruptions in video clippings bother you to no end and you still want to watch the video briefing on BBC or CNN, or download songs from iTunes, you might have to look for a connection with high speed data transfer. For loading chat applets, voice or video calling, and using VOIP technology for Internet Phones also requires high speed connectivity. Of course, the price charged by the provider plays a crucial role in your decision. There are limited and unlimited data transfer options available in the market at competitive prices.

There are many broadband service providers in the UK market. While they are competing with each other for market share, some charge a small one-time set up and others do it for free. A connectivity contract has to be signed, which is usually of a one-year duration; some plans require a 1.5 year contract and the usage is usually divided into a few plans: low capacity limit (around 2-5 GB), mid capacity limit (usually 10- 40 GB) and Unlimited download. BT, AOL broadband, UK Online, sky, pipex and plusnet are only some of the broadband services offering great deals. So if your dial up has been driving you crazy, you know you are in the remaining 12% of net users in UK and its time to make your move fast and your internet connection even faster.

Broadband Connection, International Calling Cards and Free Gift Mobile Phone

The death toll of analog technology as a means of data and voice transmission was rung as businesses started venturing out of their regional or territorial strongholds.

As the footprints of the corporate houses started crossing time zones and political boundaries, communication became increasingly important. Not only with clients but also with own employees, who were possibly quite a few time zones away, and supposedly working for the benefit of the organization. It was not only a case of keeping a tab on the employees and asking them for daily reports but also being able to provide guidance and support at crunch moments.

Connectivity gained a major boost with the advent of mobile phones. Now the person and his phone became inseparable. He could be connected any time anywhere. The need to be at the table or in the office did not exist anymore. The final frontier was crossed when the World Wide Web opened up the vista of e-commerce! The whole world became available on the desktop and corporate houses just could not wait to conquer it.

The opportunities are there waiting to be grabbed but the communication was proving to be a bottleneck. The Bell Laboratories were already working at it since they could envisage beforehand that such a requirement was in the offing. They wanted to be ready before the market felt the need for it!

They came out with the concept of T carriers. This was a revolution of sorts in the communication world! The whole concept of analog translation was discarded and the concept of digitization took its place. The voice and data were converted into digitized packets and transferred through optic fibers instead of copper lines.

The speed, capacity and clarity of data transfer increased manifold. A single T1 (the first generation of T carriers) line could accommodate as many as 24 channels. In a lay man's language it meant that while a single telephone line could support either one voice communication or data transfer at one point of time, a single T1 connection could handle as many as 24 separate conversations simultaneously!

The speed also increased sixty times more than that was till then available over conventional copper wire phone lines. Everybody thought that the final peak has been scaled; the ultimate in communication technology has been achieved! But nobody realized that e-commerce would become such a vital life blood in world of business. So, the quest for an even faster and better communication channel was on.

The next offering from the Bell Laboratories was T3. It was essentially an improvement over the earlier T1. Well the word "improvement" is really an understatement.

T3 was forty five times faster than a T1 connection and it had the capacity to carry 672 channels. It roughly worked out to the astounding fact that a single T3 line was capable of servicing an office establishment consisting of approximately 4000 people.

But that was also not the end! Now it was the turn of OC3. In fact OC indicates that data is essentially conveyed through optic fiber. Depending on the architecture used, OC3 is also known as STS-3 and STM-1.

Instead of getting bogged down in a maze of capital letters which many of us can not make any sense of, let us try to find out how much more efficient this new variant is.

Well, an OC3 connection consists of one hundred T1 lines synchronized together. Yes one hundred! And the synchronization gives the impact of more than a 100 T1 lines. Please sit on a comfortable chair and try to figure out what a massive communication power has been unleashed.

No good thing comes free. The installation cost of an OC3 connection depends very much on the infrastructure already present at the subscriber's end.

Article written by Van Theodorou, he gives a free consultation to see if you can slash money off your telecom expenses, including OC3 and all guaranteed lowest on voice t1 service.

Do you remember the days? Firing up your 200Mhz turbo PowerPC, dialling up using your 56k modem, waiting an age for your hotmail page to show up, waiting some more to check your e-mails only to have your connection die just as you hit the send button! How times change.

It's funny, once you've used broadband you quickly forget how painful the dial up connection was. I used to run my business on dial up and looking back I managed rather well. But these days there's no way I could do without my broadband connection.

There's no doubt about it, broadband is well and truly here to stay. It is of course a logical progression - streaming audio and video demand much higher bandwidth and broadband connections are the only way to achieve anything which is at all usable.

A recent survey revealed that 53% of Americans who use the Internet now use a broadband connection. What they failed to point out is that obviously this means 47% still use a dial up connection. This actually equates to around 60 million people. These kind of statistics are mirrored in other developed countries. When you consider a large chunk of the developing world still uses dial up then you realize that's an awful lot of people still using a slow Internet connection.

So is it possible to speed up your dial up connection?

Well actually yes it is. There are quite a few services online these days allowing you to "accelerate" your dial up connection. These Internet accelerators claim to be able to boost the speed of your dial up connection by as much as six or seven times.

Before you scream with delight at this prospect I feel I should point out right now that these accelerator services are not high speed broadband Internet services. They use a different kind of technology based on the same idea as things like zip files and mp3 files. These files use a compression algorithm to dramatically reduce the file size.

Internet accelerators work in the same way and most providers have also implemented a caching technology whereby they store local copies of popular web sites. These local copies are pre compressed and can be sent to the user very quickly. The user has a piece of software sitting on their PC which decompresses the data as it comes in. This is how the dramatic speed increases are achieved.

Many people report excellent success with these systems. Some people are even comparing the accelerators with broadband services

So while this is a really good thing for basic web pages, the technology falls down as soon as you start working with large video or audio files etc. Since an mp3 file is already compressed there's not much more compression that can be done and so the Internet accelerator has little effect. Plus many services have a file size limit meaning they will not even attempt to compress anything as big as a regular pop music mp3 file.

But if you're just loading up normal web pages without too much flash animation and all the other bells and whistles, then I highly recommend you get yourself an accelerated service. If your ISP doesn't offer it there are plenty that do so vote with your feet and check out some of these excellent services.

For more information simply search Google or Yahoo! for the term "dial up accelerator" or something like "speed up my dial up connection". You'll find lots of providers ready to supply you with service.

Some popular services in the USA are NetZero and Earthlink. In the UK you want to be taking a look at someone like Mistral or Onspeed.com

Fabio writes for many niches and is an experienced researcher. He has written articles covering a wide range of subjects and enjoys plying his trade especially on the Internet. He is currently sponsoring Ambient Modem News and Blogs and can be reached on fabio@linkz-and.info

It is not always easy to find the best broadband service for you. Wading through a cyber sea of websites offering 'best' deals, now also made more confusing by the plethora of websites offering comparison deals, it is hard to make a choice about which one is the best broadband service for you. You can't believe the marketing hype from the many different ISP's (internet service providers like Virgin, Tiscali or BT), you have to look at a variety of factors. Here is the best way to find the one that is right for you.

Narrow it down!

Firstly, if you have no idea what kind of package you are looking for then you should get in and make some decisions about speed and download limit. Do that before you do anything else and you will find already that your task is much simpler. A quick guide to how to choose is that if you are a light internet user and you only browse a few pages and use it for email, then you will only need a low (say 1GB) download cap and you can choose a package with a low speed (512Kbps to 2Mbps).

If you are a medium user, and there are several people browsing and emailing every day and maybe watching streaming videos such as the ones on Youtube or on BBC, then you might want to go for bigger downloads (such as 10GB) and better speeds of around 4Mbps -10Mbps. If you want to game a lot online (for instance with World of Warcraft) or download music and movies regularly then you should look at either high download caps or unlimited caps and the highest speeds you can get (20-24Mbps). These will cost more but give you the best speeds around.

Always check comparison sites

Comparison sites will give you an overview of what broadband offers are out there for your needs and price range. This is a short cut so that you do not have to check many different sites. It will also introduce you to smaller providers offering better deals. Don't be afraid to go with people you have not heard of, often they give better deals and service than the big guns you have heard of.

Look for reviews

A lot of comparison sites will offer an average customer review but it can also be well worth looking for independent user review sites. It is defiantly good to get an idea of what kind of customer service you can expect when things go wrong, as most people do not know enough about computers to fix any technical problems. Make sure that if this happens, your provider does offer reliable technical support. The best way to find out if they do is to look at what other users are saying about them.

With this in mind you will get yourself a good deal with the right provider.

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