Broadband is, excuse the pun, a pretty broad term. Americans believe minimal DSL links at 384kbps download speeds with 128kbps upload speeds are broadband. Koreans believe broadband is 10Mbps, because that's what they receive thanks to their government demanding their telecom companies provide serious bandwidth. At least Verizon continues to roll out their Fiber to the Home project, FIOS, that delivers a potential 100Mbps to users in the service area.

For the majority of us in home offices or small businesses, broadband means either cable Internet access or DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) from a phone company. Wireless broadband for home and small businesses awaits WiMAX to get rolling, and satellite based broadband remains acceptable only as a last resort, or for specialized retail applications such as linking thousands of convenience stores around the northern hemisphere.

Luckily, broadband competition between the cable companies and the phone companies still pushes speed and technical improvements. Most locations have multi-megabit broadband access from either their cable provider, a phone company, or both. Both cable and DSL residential packages offer 3Mbps speeds, or higher, and small and medium businesses can get an upgraded residential package for well under $100 per month. Small businesses can easily host their own Web and e-mail servers with an upgraded residential broadband service that provides static IP addresses.

Even companies with traditional telecom links, like T1 data lines, can benefit from using cable or DSL providers in a backup role. 18 months ago I reviewed routers with dual WAN connections to take advantage of using two Internet service providers for fault tolerance. Double Your Bandwidth, Double Your Fun showed how good a job some vendors have done making such access redundancy easy.

A companion piece to the Double Your Fun test is a short review of a system that works as a fail-over option only, connecting to a second Internet access link when the first link goes away. Since Check Point has considerable market share in this area, take a look at Check Point's Safe@Office 225 as well.

Voice Over Internet Protocol

VoIP may be an ugly acronym, but people keep buying it, and buying it, and buying it. My specialty, consumer and micro-business VoIP implementations, has been fully described in my latest book and in a variety of articles at the O'Reilly Press site . The list of "Related O'Reilly Articles" has two great articles defining the Top 10 question people ask about Internet Telephony (good things) and the Top 7 questions people should ask but don't (possible problems for broadband phone use depending on your situation). Since Vonage and Skype (now owned by eBay) lead the market, explanatory articles exist on both services.