XP users will remember that last year most of us had to send off for the Service Pack 2 update to be posted to us on CD because our Internet connection wasn't capable of downloading all the files involved. In the early part of the process, we had to wait about a fortnight for the CD to arrive. Later when demand eased, the process took only a few days. Imagine being able to download something from the Internet similar in size (about 270 megabytes) in two minutes or so (yes, two minutes - not hours or, perish the thought, days).

Now imagine such a service costing about as much as a broadband service of one-tenth the speed ($50 per month). All you need is a fibre optic cable running down your street and you too could have a connection to the Internet of 15 megabits per second (ten times faster than what our national carrier can provide, and five hundred times faster than dialup).

But what would you do with it? You don't want to send, or be receiving, hundreds of megabytes of videos and photos to family and friends every second of the day. Well, there are plenty of companies world-wide who want to sell their services and they can't wait until more of us have a high speed Internet connection: video and TV on demand, movies, music, internet radio and phone services (VOIP). As well, there are communities who aren't waiting - Philadelphia city officials will set up a wireless Internet network across the 135 square miles of their city and have high speed Internet access for about 80% of the city by the end of 2006 for $20 per month or so. Meanwhile Japan and South Korea have been providing their residents with 20 Mbits per second high speed Internet access for some time.

Once we all have access to a high speed Internet via fibre optic, whether we live in a metro or regional area, the plethora of new gadgets and gizmos appearing daily begins to make sense. There's not much point in purchasing a media centre device to share high definition TV, music and videos with other computers and the TV in the house if we're unable to receive such services in the first place across an out-dated copper-wire network.

Spend some time browsing the sites listed in this week's column to see what services many residents are already enjoying. Apologies in advance to dialup users who come across sites developed by webmasters who assume we all have high-speed Internet access.