Who needs Broadband anyway?

NOW I'M CONFUSED. After banging on about BT's seeming total disinterest in providing me with broadband because I have the temerity not to live in central London, I found myself in a pub talking to another old hack [Good grief. Who'd have thought it? ?Ed] last week and it occurred to me that maybe I don't actually need it at all.

My state of the ark ISDN connection allows me to connect at 64K which in reality means a maximum download speed of about 8Kbps. But hang on a mo - I don't actually want to download entire feature films, whole series of Red Dwarf, or every album ever recorded by Phil Collins, and I already have more than enough pictures of pliant young donkeys in compromising positions to last me a lifetime.

When I sat down and thought about what I actually need the web to do it came down to reasonably fast email access. And even then speed isn't critical the usual procedure is to kick off Outlook when I get up in the morning and leave it to download while I have a shower and make the coffee. Even with all the African money-laundering scams and cheap Viagra offers, everything's ready to read by the time I sit down with a mug of Costa Rica's finest.

So 9600bps might be good enough for what I need, apart from the extra cost of the phone calls. Single channel ISDN is just fine and I've never tried running both channels at the same time to get 128K apart from once trying it just to see if it worked. The idea of paying BT for two phone calls made me break out in a rash.

But although speed isn't important, the cost certainly is. Last time I looked, BT's ADSL Broadband comes in at about £16 a month [More like 27 nicker, Ed.]. I'm paying more than twice that for Home Highway and BT OpenWound waited until I'd signed up before dumping its unmetered access model and started charging for call time should I be so reckless as to stay connected for more than ten minutes a month (it's more than that really, but you get the idea). This isn't due to users being antisocial, of course, it's due to BT being too tight-fisted to support enough ports.

As a result, I'm paying shedloads of cash for a far-inferior service. This is makes as much sense as the Ford Motor Company charging more for an entry-level Fiesta than a top of the range supercharged Jaguar XJR.

And now, BT says a new offering for the Broadband-free is on the horizon. Midband will provide 128K ISDN access using the Home Highway boxes, but for the price of one phone call and will be priced lower than ADSL. This is a step in the right direction, of that there is no doubt. But I'm no longer convinced that I need the extra speed.

Oh bugger. I'd completely forgotten about 28Mb Microsoft Service packs... µ