Most of the marketing for broadband sells the fact that broadband is a fast, always-on service. So what are the real advantages, and what's wrong with your existing home dialup access?

If you're considering broadband for home, here's a summary of the key differences between broadband and dialup:

• Cost - Key advantage is that there are no call charges so you don't have to worry about hanging up when you're finished. On the downside, you have to pay a monthly subscription fee to use broadband, and have to buy a special broadband modem (although see the offers below!).
• Connection time - This is where the 'always-on' bit has benefits - you establish a connection, and hang on to it. You don't have to worry about logging off to save money. This saves all the hanging about waiting for your modem to dial in, connect, establish a connection and authenticate with your password
• Speed - Standard dialup modems have a maximum speed of 56k, and broadband typically offers between 256k, 512k, 1meg or 2meg connections. Note that you're sharing your bandwidth with other users in your area, so data transfer speeds vary, and you're unlikely to achieve the maximum throughput (this is known as 'contention', and eases bottlenecks at phone exchanges and ISPs.
• Phone line - When you're online with broadband, your home phone line isn't tied up.

What is Broadband?

Broadband connections (ADSL) provide high-speed Internet access over a standard phone line. The advantage of a broadband connection over a standard dialup service, is that Broadband is considerably faster, and is 'always-on', meaning that once you're logged on, your PC is online until the PC is turned off again. Broadband enables both telephone calls and your permanent Internet connection to operate on the same phone line simultaneously. This means that there is no longer any need for any users to have two lines - one for Internet and one for voice and fax calls.