Once upon a time, getting broadband was easy. You picked up the phone or went online with your creaky old wind-up modem (which was six months old and therefore hopelessly out of date), you waited for your line to be ADSL-enabled and then the operative from your service provider came round to make it all work.

None of which is a bad deal, except in a couple of respects. First, the delays you might have expected weren't always technical - they might be associated with the wait for an engineer to become available. Second, no matter what your requirements - networking, single user, you name it - you had to have the ADSL or cable modem your provider offered you. It was, in other words, a very new industry and there was all but no way "they" were going to let the new user loose on their equipment.

Times change, and they change radically. The "self-install" option emerged during the summer and essentially it does what it hints at on the tin.

Composer Nik Ryan bought the service through Breathe and has been delighted so far: "It took two weeks longer than expected because I let the modem sit there and waited for an engineer - I didn't realise that it was all turned on from the exchange," he says.

Installation was simple. In his case, Breathe sent the modem, although not all suppliers do this (the ADSL modems are easy to pick up from decent hardware suppliers). Ryan plugged it in, entered a few numbers into boxes for the set-up according to the instructions, and was on the net permanently, immediately. "It changes the internet from a glorified Yellow Pages into a rich multimedia resource," he says.

Ryan's use of the internet could be described as "extreme" since he's using it to collaborate with musicians in other countries and even continents. Using a software system called Rocket, he and his colleagues are able to share their work space on screen and put things together without being in the same place. On a recent trip to America he wrote some music for an advertisement: "There was someone in San Francisco doing the sound effects and someone in New York doing the voiceover; we had it all picture-synched in 12 minutes flat."

Understandably, Ryan recommends broadband to anyone, both from the simplicity and the value points of view.

Of course there are horror stories. Sean Fleming, an independent PR consultant, asked BTOpenworld to activate his line and send him the stuff - and not only did the Intel modem it supplied not work, it made his system crash. "I called on day one and among the things I asked was, if this isn't fixable, how easy will it be to cancel the service? They were adamant that I would have to pay the full 12-month subscription," he says.

"Every contact after that involved their insisting they weren't responsible for anything except the line." An engineer came and tested the line but refused to use Fleming's modem to do so. Fleming ended up talking to Intel's support himself on the phone, and eventually withdrew. He is currently considering other options. He points to websites and newsgroups reporting similar events as evidence that he is not alone.

BTOpenworld itself says that its policy is to liaise between the product supplier and the customer whenever a third party product causes a problem, and that on-site engineers from BT Wholesale aren't actually from BTOpenworld itself, so they can't look at the modems.

In fact a lot of the evidence suggests that self-install is a good option for the majority of business customers. NTL has noted a 50 per cent decrease in demand for technical support when people install their own systems, presumably in part because the equipment is designed for simplicity.

All of which is fine if you can get broadband, but as the Broadband for Britain campaigners will confirm, it is not always that easy. Trevor Sherman is a freelance trainer and one of the campaign's "local heroes" - a walking example of why service provision isn't adequate. He lives close to the M1 just north of Nottingham, and his exchange has no plans to make broadband available.

"I want to work with colleagues and put our courses online, using teleconferencing as well. You need a good, synchronised connection for that, which basically knocks satellite on the head for me."

The local exchange doesn't have an official "magic trigger" - the number of people requesting broadband that will force an exchange to upgrade to broadband - but BT gave Sherman an unofficial number of 200. "There are only 800 people in the village - it's a ludicrous number," he says.

This hits businesses in the area as well as businesses elsewhere. "IBM has told employees who want to work substantially from home that it will pay for their ADSL connections," explains Sherman.

"One of our villagers wanted to take that up, but where can he go?" The campaign continues to press for ubiquitous broadband coverage.

Assuming a business is in a broadband area, whether through an ADSL supplier or a cable company, the process of getting connected is simple. If you have an ISDN connection through BT's Business Highway or a similar service you will need to get this disconnected and, yes, you will lose the extra numbers that came with this. You then put your order in and wait for the modem to arrive. Meanwhile, BT turns the service on at its end and either your ISP sends a modem or you buy one, plug it in and follow the on-screen instructions.

Ryan remains almost bemused by how straightforward DIY broadband installation was: "It's almost a philosophical point: you don't feel as though you ought to be paying extra for something that just comes into your house through a box that's already there."

The opportunities it opens up are many; the costs are surprisingly low.

Broadband: why it pays for small businesses

So once you actually have broadband, what can you do with it? If you're not suffering from the lack of an always-on connection, is this an issue you need to address? Frankly the answer is probably yes, partly because your competition will be doing so.

Broadband can change your business, but only if your staff are willing to buy into the change. Emails, for example, will start to come in all the time rather than whenever you log on; this clearly means you can respond to them much more quickly.

Only by actually doing so, though, will you reap any benefit. Researching items on the web, and internet-based procurement, will stop costing extra in the face of an unmetered, always-on account. And if you upload your own website or regularly send and receive large files electronically, the time these actions take will shoot down immediately.

Remember, though, that the people to whom you are sending might not have broadband - so what seems a little file to you can turn out to be a very large one to the recipient with a simple dial-up account.

The good news is the cost. ADSL connections, which are the most common form of broadband link, will set you back around £90 for one-off activation then around £17-£30 a month depending on who you're buying from.

That's for a single user; businesses with LANs can expect to go up to around £70 a month. Compared with the average cost of ordinary internet provision these prices aren't too bad. Cable providers charge around the same, and satellite companies - no, it is affordable - are starting to offer services at around the £25 a month level.

Of these options ADSL is the least hassle, particularly given the self-install option, since it doesn't involve any new cabling or infrastructure on your site. The others clearly require extras, but the disruption should only be comparable to having a new phone line put in.

And broadband pays. East London-based travel agent Freestyle Ventures had grown earlier this year to the extent that it needed to do something more active than before about managing its data. It faced the choice of either hiring someone as an IT manager, or getting a third party to look after it. It chose the latter. Managing director Stephen Roach explains that the timing was good. "The platform became available on which we could have all our data stored securely by someone else and access it over the internet," he says. He chose Telewest and opted for multi-user broadband. "We were also looking at leased lines for speed, but the costs were much more appealing for broadband."

The installation, including seven Microsoft licences, went in six months ago. Employees with the right password and security controls can now get at company information anytime, no matter where they are in the world. Roach reckons costs over that period have shrunk by about 30% compared with what they would have been had he continued with his ISDN connection from home.

He remains a satisfied customer: "When there's going to be a problem they call us first and tell us it's going to be down for a couple of hours or whatever; we usually find it's fixed in half the time."

Further help

Things to check when commissioning broadband

· Try to get a service level agreement (SLA), with enforceable penalties if your broadband supplier lets you down

· Remember that cheapest isn't necessarily best - a lot of internet companies have gone under in the past, and you don't want to lose your connection

· Broadband does suffer the occasional outage - so don't forget to keep the old modem as a backup!