The biggest effect of broadband has been the rise of streaming multimedia: music, video, games, and more. On dial-up, you had to spend hours downloading these files, saving them and then playing them in a separate program. Now, you can get plug-ins for your web browser that allow you to just go to the page and see the video or hear the music, instantly – as it can download faster than it plays, there’s no waiting.

Understandably, this has been very popular. The fortunes of iTunes, Apple’s legal music service that allows you to buy individual songs cheaply over the Internet, are directly tied to broadband – when you have the choice between goings to the shop or just clicking a button and hearing the song the next second, there’s no contest. Video sites like YouTube and Google Video have done well, too, as people look for short, funny videos in a spare moment.

Online gaming is another excellent application of broadband – whether it’s free flash games, or amazing ‘massively multiplayer’ online worlds inhabited by thousands of people from all over the world, the extra data transfer capability provided by broadband makes gaming a lot less frustrating.

One final thing that many people don’t think about is that broadband has made online shopping much, much more popular than it was. Although the sites, prices and delivery times haven’t changed, the convenience of getting to e-commerce websites and browsing around the store has been improved dramatically with broadband. Put simply, when you have broadband, you find yourself making more use of the Internet than you ever did before, whatever it is you want to do.