Most of BT's network is digital and carries massive amounts of information, the nation’s voice and fax calls, commercial data, emails and internet traffic - quickly on optical fibre connections. But the ordinary phone line between your home or office and the local telephone exchange is generally made of copper cable that carries the same amount of information much more slowly.

Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technologies increase the speed and volume of information that can be sent to the home or office, allowing you to download and experience web pages, graphics, music, video and text in real time. DSL delivers broadband over your phone line.

Broadband speed or ‘bandwidth’ indicates how much digital information (as binary digits or ‘bits’) can be received over the line. Speed and bandwidth are measured in thousands (kilobits) or millions (megabits) of bits per second and are shown as K, Kbps or Kbit/s and M, Mbps or Mbit/s.

Different speeds suit different purposes. The faster the speed - or the greater the bandwidth - the less time it takes to access or send material and this can be particularly important for businesses. Broadband is widely offered at peak speeds of up to 128K, 512K (the most common choice for home and small business use, also known as ‘half a Meg’), 1024K (1Meg) and 2048K (2Meg). Higher speed broadband services are also being developed. Trials are starting in April 2005 with a view to launching higher speed services nationally from the autumn.

Westlake offers asymmetric DSL - ADSL - broadband services that particularly suit the needs of home and small business users. ADSL splits your phone line into separate channels for voice and data so you can make and take voice calls even when you are online.

With ADSL, downloads (items you have requested) run faster than uploads (documents or files you send out), which suits surfing the net and downloading music and other information. More than 99.8 per cent of lines connected to a broadband exchange should now be able to get an ADSL broadband service.

For details of our ADSL packages and prices click here.