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Upgrading to Broaderband

Not content with a 2meg service we have accepted the offer we couldn't refuse to upgrade to the 8 Max service from BT where they try to squeeze a few more meg out of the copper path from here to the local exchange. The news groups are full of horror stories but we are going to try to be calm. We had the swithch over e-mail promptly at eight o'clock this morning and the router control software says the service has changed and the other PC suggests that the speed has gone up to 2.2Meg in contrast with one of the online checks which says that nothing has happened yet.

The performance of this technology is so much better than any of us in the UK industry had any reason to suspect when we first looked at it 15 or so years ago. We thought that our line lengths and equipment practices would severely limit the bandwidth that could be carried and there were all sorts of worries about interference with the performance of the voice traffic being carried in the same cables but we were wrong and it has worked spectacularly well.

For our business it just speeds up the whole site maintenance process where we are now regularly making changes to hundreds of pages every week this is very worthwhile. Composer of the week has now been extended to the product page templates which is what has pushed up the volume and I'm sure we will develop other regular site wide content changes as time goes by. This is partly to keep Googlebot interested but also to test various messages out in different contexts.

Google has acknowleged our site map XML file now and provides feedback on errors, common words and search phrases which is an interesting development to say the least.

Some of the errors were in the site map file so we have fixed those too.

We're 100 in the queue now.

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