I am now in the vanguard of the broadband revolution. Last month, I had a cable modem installed for my home computer. This came after nine months of waiting for BT to install ADSL. Finally, BT told me I couldn't have it because I live too far away from an exchange. Apparently my neighbourhood in north-west Surrey is destined to be left behind on the internet superhighway.

Frustrated, I telephoned my cable company, NTL, and was astonished to hear they not only had a broadband internet product for home users, but said they could install it in a week. I was even more flabbergasted when they did. A man in a van turned up - on time - and in less than an hour, I was up and running.

The service is permanently on line. It costs £24.99 a month, including modem rental, and there are no call charges. The modem acts like a long piece of wire connecting my Macintosh to the internet via an Ethernet port. The setup was seamless. I just flipped my Mac's TCP/IP connection from PPP to Ethernet via DHCP Server and it worked first time.

My reason for wanting broadband - apart from my nature as an early adopter of everything - was speed. I often work from home and send huge PowerPoint and Word documents back and forth via email, as well as downloading documents from the web.

True, I appreciate the extra bandwidth. Now, when I need a home file for the office, there's no messing around with Zip disks. I simply connect to my home machine from work and get the file I want. But speed itself has turned out to be less life-changing than the fast - or rather, instant - connection time and the low cost.

Now that my home computer is permanently connected to the internet, it has become an extension of my computer. It's like having a large hard disk available at all times. I've stopped downloading documents to store on my system, and started saving just the links. When I need a software upgrade, a game patch, or a new device driver, I start downloading and get on with something else.

Since I'm no longer waiting for connection, I use my PC to find out things that used to involve phone calls or flipping through the newspaper, such as what's on TV, whether I've paid my Visa bill, and what kind of washing machines are on sale at Currys.

But I have made a sobering discovery. Instant access cannot make up for old-fashioned human error. I have not been able to check my online banking account because I seem to have forgotten my password. I will have to make a phone call to straighten that out. Oh, well.

Here are a couple of recent "always on" behaviour modifications that strike me as interesting. I have started listening to Radio 5 on the internet. I still listen to Radio 4 on the radio, since it is FM stereo and the reception is good. But Radio 5 is medium wave and poor quality, so it comes through clearer on the internet. I'm still annoyed that I can't listen to football on Saturday afternoon this way. Another audio example is Napster: more than once during the week I have used it to download tracks that I own because I am too lazy to search for them in another room.

The early experiences gained from the transition to broadband suggest some thing about the impending transition from 9.6kbps GSM circuit-switched data (eg, current Wap services) to the world of next generation high-speed mobile phone services. I predict it won't be the bandwidth that is the driver (hence my scepticism about video as the major revenue stream for mobile operators), but the fact that connection is instant and has low marginal cost. With a permanent connection, for example, why store phone numbers in your phone? If your phone is permanently connected, you might as well leave the phone numbers on your PC at home: the phone can get them whenever it needs them. The entire internet will seem as if it is stored on your handset.

Even though £24.99 a month for instant connectivity may seem reasonable, it's worth remembering that we pay about a third more in Britain for broadband access than users in the US or even Germany, due to a lack of competition at the retail level.

I may be in the vanguard for some time. Despite all the hype about DSL, cable modems, and other broadband technologies, most internet users will be stuck with low-speed, dial-up modems for the foreseeable future.