Four months of living with a high-speed internet connection has not made me less impatient - probably the reverse. However, it has changed the direction of most of my venom. Today, I get angrier with stupid web designers than I do with British Telecom. At least BT delivered, which is more than my local cable company, Telewest, could manage after years of badgering.

My high-speed connection is BT Openworld's business ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) service, which uses a stan dard phone line to deliver 512 kilobits per second into a small black box called a router. This lets me connect up to four PCs to the net simply by plugging them in and configuring the PCs' Ethernet network cards, and it could support a larger network. However, it costs £100 per month.

There is a cheaper alternative. BT now offers an ADSL service that connects to a PC's USB (universal serial bus) port for £40 a month. This is aimed at home users with one computer, preferably a PC running Microsoft Windows 98 or 2000. I do have Windows 98SE, but my 150MHz Pentium MMX machine is too old to have USB.

Needless to say, using ADSL is dramatically better than dialling an ISP via a modem. It is a huge boon to have a permanent internet connection. You are always on the net, whether you are using your PC or not. You don't have to think twice about searching for something on Google: just hit the button and it is there.

In practice, ADSL runs at about 10 times the speed of a 56k modem. This makes a tremendous difference to the quality of streaming video: it is possible to watch a movie, for example, as long as the display window is fairly small. It also makes downloading large files very easy. In fact, I can log on to my office mailbox, download several large files at once, watch a streaming video, and carry on surfing without any noticeable reduction in performance.

But there are a few problems, including latency and congestion. Latency is the amount of time it takes to contact an site: the time to send it a signal and get a response. Sites that are slow to respond to a modem are still slow with ADSL.

Congestion is caused by bottlenecks on the internet, where too much traffic is competing to use a connection. And the web is only as fast as its slowest link. With ADSL, I have a fast connection to my ISP, and BT Openworld has a fast connection to the net, but there are still traffic jams further along the superhighway.

Still, one advantage of ADSL, compared with cable modems, is that you usually get the bandwidth for which you pay. By contrast, a cable is a shared resource with no guaranteed throughput. However, given the speed of the web nowadays, and the scarcity of cable modems, this is not really an issue.

Websites also create problems when the server is too slow and/or the pages are too big. This is where ADSL gets me really annoyed. It is frustrating being able to download stuff at more than 500kbps when some sites will only deliver 2kbps or less.

Many websites keep users hanging about while they download stupid Flash intros no one wants, pointless graphics no one wants, badly written Java applets no one wants, and similar assorted rubbish.

Once you have got used to web pages appearing in three to six seconds or less, any page that takes 15 to 90 seconds becomes very annoying. It looks broken.

For comparison, I now get a page from Yahoo in the US in about three seconds, and I would be happier if it arrived in one second. Guardian Unlimited is on the edge, with pages loading in about seven seconds: that is about the same as SiliconValley.com, and The New York Times's technology page. The Wall Street Journal's site usually delivers readable text in half that time. Well, it has to deliver: people pay to use it.

ADSL means I am much more likely to run film clips, play games online, and download software updates and utilities. However, there is a big difference between waiting for something I want and waiting for something I have not asked for.

Some people seem to think that the widespread availability of broadband will enable web designers to fill their pages with graphics and multimedia. I am not convinced.

What broadband actually gives you is a much greater appreciation of the speed of sites such as Google and Yahoo. Rather than being the salvation of badly designed sites like the old Boo.com , ADSL actually makes them look worse.