For anyone who's been asleep in a cave for the past 3 years, ADSL is a telecommunications technology that allows existing copper telephone lines to support high speed data traffic with little or no modification. You end up with an 'always-on' connection to the Internet at speeds up to 40 times faster than a conventional dial-up modem can manage. UK residents can do no worse than visit www.adslguide.org.uk for further information.

I've plumped for the (cheapest!) 512kBps 'wires-only' ADSL service from BT. The line testing and conversion work is done at your local telephone exchange, so you don't have to wait for a BT engineer to visit your house. They just do what they have to do and tell your ISP when they've finished. The 'wires-only' part means that you have to source your own ADSL router rather than put up with whatever your provider chooses to give you.

The end result (in my case at least) is that I've got a small grey plastic box on a shelf in the living room and I'm getting download speeds of 50-55 kBytes per second. This equates to being able to download a typical 3.5MB MP3 file in around 65 seconds, as opposed to nearly 9 minutes over my old modem connection. Wicked!

This would probably be an appropriate point to say "thanks!" to Wendy for putting up with having this mess in the front room - all I can say is I'll move it as soon as I can get the cabling sorted out...