It’s not too long ago now since broadband became mainstream or at least here in Ireland. Although it was just a short time ago, it still seems strange to hear the old dial up tone that your computer used to make when connecting to the internet!

The good old 56k connection, and you would curse the life out of anyone who would dare pick up the phone while you were on the internet because you knew you would have to go through the whole process of connecting again.

Back when I first joined Bebo I was still using dial-up! I remember trying to load a video that someone had on their profile page, it would take hours just to load a short 1 minute video.

I think it was around the Summer of 2006 that I got broadband first in my house, the internet became a completely different place, I soon became very addicted to YouTube because I could actually watch videos without having to wait for them to load.

Now though as fast as the internet is, it is still not fast enough. I have a 3mb connection in my house and apparently that is the fastest that can be pushed to my house, and it’s not like I live very far from the closest exchange point!

I think this day and age broadband should be going a lot faster than it is, I know that Eircom are rolling out fibre powered broadband and it will be available here in Louth between September and December of this year. So at least that will help but I still don’t think it is fast enough.

The new fibre broadband from eircom is going to be 8mb and apparently it should be a steady 8mb, it should never drop ridiculously low like down to 0.5mb which is not uncommon at the moment!

So from 56k dial up where loading a page with one image in a minute was pushing it, we now have high speed broadband where we can load thousands of pictures, videos & music within seconds, that is a huge leap and as long as it continues the internet will only become a better and more useful (than it already is) place.