Broadband in the UK: spoilt for choice

The majority of UK residents are now spoilt for choice: there's broadband from your phone company - even if it's not BT - or broadband-speed connections via mobile phones. There's wireless broadband, broadband via the cable TV system and even some systems where you can get broadband via the power lines themselves.

As far as we're concerned, broadband is an internet connection that runs at 256Kbit/s or faster, about five times faster than the speed of dial-up, allowing you to download even large files relatively fast.

But not all broadband services are equal, even allowing for speed differences. Some include extra services, others offer the bare bones at a bargain basement price. And then there are some that only let you use them a certain amount per month, or conversely insist on a minimum amount of use.

With competition for your business heating up and pushing prices down, the range of deals can be confusing. We're going to show you how to choose a service suited to you.

Deciding your needs
There's a huge array of broadband choices from hundreds of providers. Some do little more than resell BT's wholesale service, while other companies have installed their own equipment in telephone exchanges around the country, allowing them to provide a wider range of offerings - in some cases, much faster or more flexible than BT's.

There's choice too in the extras on offer. In the days of dial-up, it was taken for granted that you'd probably get an email address and perhaps a bit of web space with an internet connection. With broadband, and the dramatic drop in prices of domain names, that's not necessarily the case.

A cut-down service that offers nothing more than a link to the net means having to pick and choose email and other services from elsewhere. Alternatively, you could go for a complete service that includes an internet link for your whole network, web space with a domain of your own, and sophisticated email facilities.

Most services, of course, lie somewhere in between, but even seemingly small differences between services could have a big impact, depending on how you use the net, so it's as well to know the questions to ask before you sign up.

What's on offer?
You may see a deal that looks amazingly cheap, only to find that it doesn't include email, for example. That might be fine if you have an email account elsewhere that you can use, or you don't mind using a web-based service such as Gmail but for a newcomer to broadband, this can be a bit awkward.

Email is one of the most important things that most of us need from a broadband connection, so it's worth looking at what's on offer. You may be able to have as many addresses as you want, but they'll all be delivered to the same mailbox - not very useful if you want to share your computer with other people.

Other services, such as AOL, provide individual mailboxes, which is better suited to several people sharing a PC. But it's not just mailboxes and addresses you need to consider; filtering for unwanted junk email and viruses are offered by an increasing number of providers.

While on the face of it having protection against mail viruses is useful, remember that you'll still need antivirus software to be protected from infection, although these can be picked up free. Just don't view mail-virus scanning as a money-saver.

Spam filtering, likewise, is desirable as long as you can control it to ensure that no genuine messages are rejected automatically without you seeing them. It's best to consider these extras as just that, and having the number of mailboxes you need for your family is more important.

Another thing that differentiates various services is extra software; the king of these is AOL, which provides a single program that does everything that most users need. This can make it simple for the novice, but can restrict the more experienced user.

Where systems like this really score is in providing parental controls to stop your children looking at things you'd rather they didn't see, either deliberately or by accident.

With the latest version of AOL, you can even control their permission to see a site when you're at work. Parental control software is a useful tool to have, if it's offered to you by another provider - but remember that you can buy your own packages to do the same thing.

Without the integrated approach that AOL has, a bundle of parental control software isn't really offering you something you couldn't buy in the shops yourself. If you have children, it's wiser to budget for control software rather than simply disregarding providers that don't offer it as part of the package. Treat other included software as a gift horse - it's often not worth paying a premium for.

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