Although I have internet access through ADSL, I confess to not having a clue about the speed or what it all means. Coming from the distant lands of Europe, people just talked about dial-up and broadband; then when I got here they started talking about ADSL. could someone wise me up about what it all means?

Also, like many people, I get fed-up with various things about TV access especially through UBC, or whatever they call themselves this week. A friend - yes straight up not me - has internet tv, which seems to come from South Africa. The only trouble is that, every now and then there are some delays of up to 5 seconds, I can't remember what it's called and he's out of contact for some time. I have no idea what bandwidth speeds we presently have but are we anywhere close to getting the sort of speed we would need for internet tv?

Over the last 5 years there haven't been any major developments in internet connectivity. ADSL was the last major change, almost completely replacing dial-up.

Around the same time, the newsgroups and fora were filled with questions on how to share internet, something which now can be done by every router with a few mouse-clicks. The goal of the designers was to make it as easy as possible for everybody without requiring any networking knowledge except very few basics.

P2P lead to more questions about NAT - not what is it? but where do I click to make it work? portforward.com was an answer to that. If you really want to learn, start with the OSI model....

Something quite interesting for Internet TV is Slingbox, basically if you know someone with cable tv back home, and a good internet connection you purchase this, and you can access the cable tv on your computer, anywhere in the world.

www.slingmedia.com/go/slingbox

I think the people back in Europe who are referring to Broadband are basically talking about ADSL, so you should consider it the same thing.