OK. Lets give everyone 100Mbps up and down.

No more bottleneck on your link.....
...but plenty of bottlenecks further down the line.

Its all a typical shortsighted money grabbing marketing scam. They're not giving you any more bandwidth at all but charging you 20 quid per month more.

All they are giving you is a better ability to get the contended bandwidth in your isps network (at the expense of other lower access-bandwidth users.) If you're an early adopter, you'll probably get a good deal and if you have a mate serving his DVD's on the same ISP's backbone you'll probably get lucky but I dont know that many ISP are re-designing and scoping backbone bandwidths and peering links to cope with a big market for super-speed access-bandwidths. No-one has the money to upgrade core networks right now - all they can do is squeeze that last from the networks they have using marketing tricks that will create major future costs for service providers.

In addition, I dont see service providers giving servers more access bandwidth either. At the end of the day, your BBC radio stream will still only be 40kbps and you'll be paying 20 quid per month more!! If you want better 'communications' with your mates, its still easier to swap ipods for a day.

Amazing isn't it, many of the new estates in the UK are connected to the exchange by fibre via TPON (at least to the street cabinets) and yet the best BT can do for those customers is to try and provide them with ADSL by using spare copper pairs that they usually install alongside the fibre.

All I can say is for the majority of us who are not within easy reach of existing fibre, don't hold your breath!

Of course, ADSL isn't stuck at 512 kilobits - but while it can get up to 6 megabits, the future is 100 megabit fibre. Here is a glimpse of what it will be like... scary!