Erol Ziya, who lives in Ealing in west London, is one of the first people in the UK to experience ADSL thanks to trials of the new technology which BT are running in the area.

As a spokesman for the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications, which is pushing for flat-rate subscriptions for phone services, rather than the existing per-minute charges, he says that in ADSL he has had a glimpse of the technology which could bring several of the group's aims into reality. He adds that using ADSL is an experience that has completely changed his perspective on the internet and what it could do for its users.

"It really is the way you should be connected to the internet," he says. "It has changed the whole use of the internet for me. "The first big difference is that it's unmetered. The second is that it is a network connection; there's never any process of dialling up. As soon as my computer is switched on I can use it.

"There's a whole range of applications and content which is now useable, that wasn't with a modem. "For me, bandwidth is just another of these computing resources; in the same way that, when we had 8MHz processors nobody knew what we'd do with 450MHz ones, you will always soak up the available resource to do things you weren't doing before.

"You get people asking 'but what would you do with all that bandwidth?'. The answer is that it defines what you can do. A whole vista of content and applications has opened up. "The unmetered aspect makes it all much more useable, because my computer is permanently connected while I'm here. I find myself able to use it as a communications medium much more.

"Voicemail is routed to my computer, people come online and it's shown on my machine and so on. The computer is now there to take messages from whatever source for me." Indeed, the trials have been such a revelation for Ziya, that he is now concerned about what happens when BT decide to bring the tests to an end.

"It's become a real personal concern to me," he laughs. "They've been feeding me broadband at budget prices - it's like I've been mainlining broadband, and now I'm paranoid they're going to take it away from me, and I'll start having withdrawal symptoms... but this is the way forward."