What a difference a decade has made to telephone bills. We realised it after a reply was left for us this week on a column from ATPM 12.09. All good stuff too, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Back in 1990, when we got our first modem and thought faxes were a neat way to communicate, we needed four telephone lines: one each for conversation and one each for our fax machines. Sending and receiving files involved long-distance telephone calls, which only became local as the Internet took off. In those days, Mistral, our first ISP, was a back bedroom in Brighton, stuffed full of modems, and a front garden with a permanent telecom trench for the ever-increasing number of cables.

It was not unusual to have a monthly telephone bill of £150, which grew to £300 when we bonded the two lines together to get BT’s ISDN. That must have been the worst-value narrowband transmission going. But at least it was quicker than modem alone. One Christmas Eve, I transmitted an urgent file by XMODEM to the same ICL factory where a motorcycle courier was taking a delivery. He collected the package and drove the 150 miles, arriving quicker than the file, which was less than a couple of floppy disks in size.

When Mistral offered ADSL, we were among its first customers. Our monthly phone bill shrank to £100, which was mainly for the ADSL line. We thought this was quite reasonable at the time. Fast forward to now, and broadband and hosting are less than thirty quid a month, the telephone bill is less than twenty, and the cost of calls is a couple of quid because we use the 18185 system. This brilliant service is free after a one-time Web registration, and most calls and SMS texts, even international, cost zero pence. You pay for the connection only, five pence usually.