We've come a long way since 56k dial-up, and marketers have long taken advantage of the audio-visual capabilities of broadband for advertising (digital media marketing more generically) and not-paid-for influence (digital media relations). You only have to witness the furore created by the online videos seeking to influence the US primaries.

But what is broadband, and where are we going from here?

To quote Connect's excellent report "Connecting Britain's Future - the slow arrival of fast broadband":

So what do we mean then by fast broadband? There is no standard set of definitions, but commonly:

  • narrowband would mean up to 512kbit/s
  • broadband would mean up to 25mbit/s
  • fast broadband would mean anything over 25mbit/s

The common industry term for such fast broadband is NGA - Next Generation Access.

Over sixty people from the communications industry (the other communications industry... the one with the switches, wires and fibres) came together yesterday evening at the Convergence Conversation event I chair, and invested a couple of hours teasing out the complexities of delivering NGA in the UK. Read more