Many months after I first heard that ntl would be revising their broardband tiers to give 2Mb for the price I was paying for 700kb, it looks looks like I have been upgraded. I had considered calling them to get it done sooner, but I didn't have that desperate a need for the extra speed. I just download 100MB of updates for Ubuntu and noticed that it was doing over 240KB/s.

My first experience of being on-line was with a Teletype (an ancient device that was more mechanical than electronic and just printed everything on a roll of paper) and an acoustic coupler (a bit like a modem except that you put the telephone handset into a pair of rubber cups and the data was sent as audible noise). That probably managed a few bytes per second at best. Later I owned various modems starting at 14.4kb and working up to the heady heights of 56kb. So now I'm getting over 30 times that speed. The upload speed is a fraction of the download. So it's still going to take a while to send large emails. I wonder if this is just a tactic to stop people sharing large files.