Last week my ISP gave me the offer to upgrade for free to their new 8Mbps ADSL service. I still have to pay more (about twice what I was paying for my 512Kbps service), but the actual upgrade (or regrade) was free.

I chose a bad week though - the upgrade coincided with a major failure at my ISP, then at BT, not to mention the additional time it took to sort out the occasional reboot of the ADSL router to see how the upgrade and retraining were going. The result was more down time than I expected, although to be fair that was because failures, not the ADSL regrade process.

Now I'm back, and things are a lot faster. Unfortunately, I'm a long way from the exchange, and with the 512Kbps service I was a couple of hundred meters over the limit, but just able to get the service. With the 8Mbps service I'm too far away to get the full 8Mbps, but the speed has increased almost five-fold to just under 2.5Mbps, and it's amazing how significant a difference it makes to everything from downloading movie trailers through to general browsing.