I have to say I really like the people at Blueyonder who are my ISP. When I first got broadband the only option I had was BTs ADSL at 512Kb/sec. This was a major improvement over dialup, but the fact that the ADSL modem only worked on Windows, which needed to be frequently rebooted (with a new call to DHCP and almost without fail a new IP address) was far from ideal. When I moved house we got digital cable TV and shortly thereafter switched to a cable modem supplied by Telewest Broadband running at 1Mb/sec. Since this provides an ethernet connection the connection is not dependent on a stable Windows platform (not sure anything or anyone should depend on that) and can be hooked up to the router for simple shared access and firewall protection.

Not only is the connection rock-solid in terms of reliability (I can only remember a couple of brief outages in the last four years), the nice people at Blueyonder keep turning up the speed at no extra cost. Last year they bumped it up to 1.5Mb/sec and then at the start of the year it went up to 2Mb/sec. Downloading music from iTunes is a breeze.

Despite being a geek, I'm still amazed at the fact I can be sitting at home logged on via VPN to a machine in the west coast of the US and the response is almost instantaneous. As Arthur C. Clarke said in Profiles of The Future, way back in 1961: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." There's definitely some magic in there somewhere.