Happy 10th birthday Broadband

Just ten years ago today those who were part of the brave new ‘internet’ revolution were still using archaic dial-up connections.

A day later, a very nice man at NTL (now known as Virgin Media) flicked a switch and our whole world changed in an instant.

We became the broadband generation, with the faster speeds allowing us to do so much more than we could have ever dreamed possible at the time.

Without the speed of broadband I very much doubt that we’d have seen phenomenon’s like Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, BBC iPlayer, the iPhone and the rampant march of online multiplayer video gaming.

We have a lot to thank that particularly nice man at NTL for don’t we?

Pre-broadband internet was not exactly user friendly was it? It would often take two minutes to load a page of text and photos. I remember regularly clicking on a page and going off to make a brew while it loaded.

Something else we’ve forgotten is just how much it cost us to use the internet back in the dark days before the NTL broadband switch on.

Single parent Mark Bush – the UK’s first user of broadband – was spending £300 a month on his dial-up connection before pre-registering for broadband with NTL.

So the next time your Tweet takes more than an instant to send, take a deep breath, think back to ten years ago today and then say a quiet thank you to that man over at NTL. Your Tweet will have arrived safely by then.

SEO? It should stand for ‘So Easy Online’ shouldn’t it?

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