It’s really great that BT wants us all to get broadband.

The telecoms giant is spending a million pounds a day on TV adverts over the coming week, and will follow that up with a £23 million campaign to push its new ‘no-frills’ broadband service.

BT hopes the ads will encourage hundreds of thousands of people - many of them net novices - to sign up for their faster, always-on Internet service over the ordinary phone network.

They certainly look good, featuring a horrified engineer who lets all of the goodies out of the broadband pipe. He then has to try and get dragons, 20m-tall game characters and Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker back into the network..

Promotion rush

At the same time cash-strapped cable companies ntl and Telewest are both working hard to sign up more broadband customers in the areas where they have networks.

Here in Cambridge you can hardly move for leaflets advertising cheap signup from ntl, and several of my friends are about to move from dialup to broadband.

The promotions do seem to be having an effect: over the country as a whole, the number of people getting broadband is increasing but only slowly.

Broadband still only makes up just ober one in twenty of the homes and businesses with an internet link. Most households still have a dialup connection.

Slow revolution

Part of this is just inertia: anyone who has struggled to get a modem working, fought with technical support at their ISP to get their mail program sorted out, and finally figured out what number to dial, is going to resist the invitation to get a brand new set of things to go wrong.

Whether it’s ADSL over the phone line or a cable modem plugged into the network, the risks just seem too great for many internet newbies.

I’ll know that the broadband revolution has succeeded when my dad decides to upgrade and doesn’t call me for help!

Where is it?

Unfortunately the main problem is not that people do not want broadband but that they simply can’t get it.

Before it can provide its ADSL service to customers BT needs to install new equipment in the local telephone exchange, and it has only been willing to do this in urban areas or places where it is sure that people will sign up.

As a result vast areas of the country, outside the main towns and cities, simply cannot get the service.

If you go to the BT website (www.bt.com/broadband/) then you can check your post code or phone number, and if you aren’t in the right area you can register your interest so that BT can decide whether it’s worth upgrading your exchange.

Get on with it BT

But this isn’t working fast enough or well enough.

If we are serious about getting people online, and if we think that an always-on connection is a good thing, then leaving the supply of the service in the hands of one company -seems to be reckless in the extreme

Especially as that company that has made some very bad commercial decisions in the past.

BT can afford £33 million to advertise a service that is only available to two-thirds of the population.

Why couldn't spend the money upgrading exchanges so they have something to sell, instead of creating demand for a product that people can’t actually get if they live outside our towns.

The Department of Commerce of the United States - the US Department of Trade and Industry - agreed to let ICANN continue to run the Internet’s name service for another year.

Don’t be surprised if you haven’t heard of ICANN. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is one of those tedious organisations that runs the hard technical bits of the net and makes sure it all fits together.

In the case of ICANN, they look after the Domain Name Service (DNS) which lets you type in the name of the Web server you want to look at - like www.bbc.co.uk - and turns it into a number which your computer understands.

It’s pretty dull stuff, but if it doesn’t work properly then we’d all notice and complain loudly.

It's our internet too

ICANN works on behalf of the whole internet, and the people who run national domains like .co.uk work through ICANN to make sure that everything fits together smoothly.

However it was set up by the US government, and still requires their approval to carry on.

Surely if the internet is global then this central operation should not be under the sole control of the US government?

We need to persuade a trusted international body, like the United Nations, to take responsibility for this sort of thing.

Otherwise we could find that US politicians start interfering with a network that should be there for everybody.

I’ve been harping on about spam - unwanted email, most of which seems to offer you the opportunity to get rich, get thin or look at pictures of naked women - for a long time now, and many of you have offered me good advice on how to control it.

Neil Hammerton pointed me to Brightmail, a commercial filtering company which has recently done a deal with the HotMail service.

It should see a significant reduction in the number of spam messages we HotMail users receive.

Darragh Smyth recommended the freely available SpamAssassin, while Craig Macdonald prefers MailWasher.

One of its best features is that it can be set to send a message back to the source of the spam that makes it looks like your email address has been shut down, so you should stop getting messages.

I want spam stopped

There are definitely some cool tricks out there, and the ones I’ve experimented with do seem to work.

But the main problem I see is that filtering doesn’t actually deal with the real problem, which is how easy it is for these annoying people to send millions of emails to people whose email addresses they have bought.

Even if all of us who find spam annoying used filters, there would still be enough gullible people out there signing up for the dodgy diets, useless ‘health’ products and get rich quick schemes to make it worth sending out the mails.

The net would still be creaking under the weight of unwanted messages - and some of them would get through to annoy me.

I want spam stopped, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t use the law to stop it.

We can do it, at least here in Europe where we don’t have fraudsters willing to claim that their latest pyramid marketing scheme is an example of ‘free speech’ and so protected under the US Constitution!