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Luckily the next broadband speed barrier has already been broken and pretty soon we should see ADSL2+ services starting, with speeds up to 24Mbit. When I spoke to UK Online I was told that ADSL2+ trials are already well underway, so the service shouldn’t be too far off. Likewise, Freedom2Surf has also announced ADSL2+ trials, as have many other ISPs, so one part of the equation is definitely being addressed.

The other part of the equation is the hardware that we need to take advantage of ADSL2+, and here the future is bright. Having had a meeting with Netgear a couple of weeks ago, it looks like making current ADSL hardware ADSL2+ compatible should just be a matter of a firmware flash – so we won’t all be dumping our routers and heading off down to the shops to by new ones.

As broadband speeds rise higher and higher, we should be able to do so much more with our Internet connections, so much so that I wonder whether broadcast will remain to be the preferred medium for entertainment delivery. Just imagine if we all had broadband connections fast enough to stream high definition video on demand, why would we want a satellite dish stuck to the side of our house? More to the point, why would we be happy with our local cable and satellite TV companies?

The World Wide Web is, as it’s name suggests, world wide. So, if you were streaming all your TV via the web, what’s to stop you from subscribing to HBO directly in the US and not having to wait for all those programmes to make it over to the UK? The idea is pretty interesting and definitely compelling - in reality it could well put an end to much of the TV piracy that’s going on today. Most of us only download TV programmes from the US because we don’t want to wait for them to air in the UK. But if we could subscribe to a US service and watch them as soon as they premier, would we bother with all that peer to peer file sharing? I doubt it.

So, perhaps there is a certain amount of need involved when opting for the fastest possible broadband connection. You’ll probably be amazed at how much difference it makes to your day to day Internet usage. But for me it’s the possibilities that faster and faster Internet speeds can bring to our lives that’s exciting, and with this in mind I can’t wait for the next big jump. Do I need 24Mbit ADSL2+? Probably not, but I can assure you that I’ll be first in line when it arrives.

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