That’s us Brits. We throw away more than any other EC country and much of it still usable. The bulk of our “stuff” ends up in giant landfill sites even if we recycle it, all because the market is flooded with dead plastic, paper, and CRT TVs.

We had to make a decision whether to give up something perfectly adequate. Our home and studio is in an area where we are offered a broadband choice from the best of the UK’s leading suppliers. Speeds available vary between pathetic to incredible, but at what point does all the speed become a waste of money?

The best our telephone line could manage was a miserly 5Mbps download and 0.8 upload. This was after numerous modem upgrades, changing wholesalers, and switching between various flavours of ADSL. We could also guarantee that at half past five, ADSL would go down. Exactly the same time we wanted to upload files of the day’s work to servers around the world. Obviously people were getting home from work and hitting their connections. But we paid a premium price for business lines and contention ratios meant to make sure we had priority access.

The move to cable was inevitable, and immediately our upload speed was better than the best download speed ADSL ever supplied. It is more than adequate for our needs and even faster than we are supposed to be paying for. Then Virgin told us we can have double that and shortly double that again. All for an additional £22 per month.