What was the first broadband connection in the UK?
Question by Paul J C G: What was the first broadband connection in the UK?
Does anyone know any of these: when the connection was installed? How fast it was? What ISP provided the connection? Who was the lucky customer? How much did it cost? By “broadband”, I mean probably at least 512kbps, not dial-up or an ISDN line (does anyone still use those?)
Best answer:
Answer by ammu
The history of broadband evolution shapes today’s market. Hence why we’re touching on it here.Significant migration of domestic internet connectivity from dialup to broadband started in year 2000 here in the UK.For the business user at that time, high speed internet connections were expensive dedicated leased lines that typically were the domain of larger businesses that had big budgets to spend on connectivity.Broadband options had been around since the late nineties with a few cable operators offering cost effective high speed connections. However, the options for small businesses and homes at the time were fairly limited with only sporadic availability of broadband connections. Getting a high speed connection at that time was a lottery of geographic location (i.e. one had to be within a particular catchment area of a Cable Company [CableCo]).
Everything changed in late 2000 when British Telecom (BT) came to the market with its generic DSL products.
Rather than BT retaining exclusive retail rights for DSL, it opened up a wholesale channel programme allowing Internet Service Providers (ISP)s to resell BT generic DSL products.There were (and still are) are two product types offered by BT wholesale:-
DataStream
IPStream
The channel programme meant that BT could leverage sales and support of its broadband products via its reseller partners. This approach has proved to a highly effective means of matching the demand for broadband with the supply in the UK marketplace.
BT have created DSL broadband as almost a tangible “commodity” whereby it is the producer / supplier and between it and the end customer is a supply chain. The model was (and still is):- Producer(BT) -> Wholesaler(BT) -> Retailer(ISP) -> Consumer.
Evolution of Broadband Services
Commercial and technical issues have changed the market in the last few years.As wholesale bandwidth has become cheaper due to technological advances, the prices for provision of DSL bandwidth have also fallen.
With Local Loop Unbundling (LLU) now in full swing, ISPs are now free to install their own equipment in local BT infrastructure. With this new freedom, higher DSL speeds of up to 24Mbps are possible. Availability of these LLU based services is currently sporadic and mainly around large cities and towns.
Source: http://www.broadband-help.com/articles/consumer/broadband_providers_in_the_UK/
What do you think? Answer below!
it cost me 45 pound a month when was beta testing for Freeserve (now Orange, previously Wanadoo). speed was only 512kbps but it was fast compared with dial up