Late last week I, and many others I would presume, were left further behind in the digital era at the stroke of a pen. What my monthly bill cheekily termed broadband was officially no longer! In fact I never really had broadband to begin with, reliant as I am on ancient lines of copper which valiantly struggled to connect me to a quaint legacy telephone exchange deep in rural Wexford. Often it has proven more useful as an indicator of wind speed than a delivery method of zeros and ones, with wind-generated friction on the line reducing those precious few minutes of 1.2 Mbps connectivity still further on stormy evenings. Well in the US the telecoms watchdog, the FCC, has just raised the bar on what can officially be labelled as broadband, state-side at least, by redefining the minimum download speed at 25 Mbps. I can but dream! Continue reading →