It's almost impossible to overestimate the impact that broadband will have on our lives. From workplace culture to at-home entertainment, from next-generation Internet to interactive television, the force that broadband unleashes will be felt by everyone who's technologically wired.

For a hint of what broadband — and the extra bandwidth it provides — can deliver, consider this: that Britney Spears music video which now takes you eons to download will waltz on to your hard disk in seconds. But broadband does a whole lot more than enable faster downloads.

Forrester Research Inc forecasts that by 2005 nearly 50 million households in the United States will indulge in "pervasive gaming". What these guys are referring is broadband gaming, or playing games on the Internet, with broadband technology as the facilitator. This means multiple real-time players plugging in from different places, even countries, to compete against and communicate with each other. So get ready for everything from video-crammed action games to more sober board and card games.

Away from the fun stuff, a broadband connection also serves more serious purposes, especially in linking professionals operating out of different locations. A 'narrowband' Internet connection can do this too, but after you've used broadband you don't ever want to touch dial-up again.

The standard rated capacity of data transfer on a telephone today is 56kbps (Kilo bits per second), and even that's more on paper than actual. Tata Broadband's DWDM-powered fibre-optic network can provide a data transfer in multiples of 2mbps (Mega bits per second), scaling up to 1,000mbps.

That's more than 15,000 times faster than the crawl you have to suffer today with 'narrowband'.

The technology that makes this possible can sometimes seem complicated, but the benefits of broadband are simple enough. Nowhere are these benefits more evident than with the Internet. Broadband allows you to have an always-on, instant and super-fast Internet connection. It enables:

faster download of large files and multimedia content;
enhanced streaming video and higher-quality music;
improved performance to play multi-person 3D games over the Internet;
greater bandwidth to download and use next-generation Internet innovations;
employees to work out of their homes.

What broadband Internet — with its ability to carry millions of bits of data to and out of your computer every second — does is make your web experience richer than ever before.