Quote: Broadband is ten years old, with Britain's first broadband customer celebrating a decade of high-speed internet access this week.
Like many Brits, single parent Mark Bush was frustrated with slow and expensive dial-up in the late nineties and agreed in March 2000 to become NTL's sole broadband client during a test period before the ISP began the full commercial roll-out of its high-speed service.
Bush was not charged for broadband access during the testing period, a far cry from the £300 per month he had been paying for dial-up access at the time.
"It was pretty impressive in the early days, with having the whole pipe to myself," he told BBC News.
Broadband has become progressively faster for the majority of customers over the past ten years, but there remains a huge gulf between those on the fastest and slowest connections.
Early users came to see 512Kbps as the norm but ten years later some are still struggling to achieve those speeds. The government has pledged to make 2Mbps broadband ubiquitous by 2014, but anyone on the slowest connections will still be experiencing a vastly different internet to those connecting to super-fast, fibre-based broadband.
For example, Virgin Media revealed last month that it will roll out 100Mbps broadband service by the end of 2010. The ISP said the new service would allow web users to download a music album in as little as 5 seconds, an hour-long TV show in 31 seconds and an HD movie in 7 minutes 25 seconds.
The company, which already offers 50Mbps broadband, also demonstrated 200Mbps speeds at last weekend's Ideal Home Show. | 
