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[Weaver]

One day, technology historians will find tremendous value in this entire site, especially the forums’ archived content. There are two historical periods: the brief dial up-period, about ten years plus a few years of tail 1994-2008 very roughly. Then the somewhat longer copper DSL era of ‘broadband’ (a word which I hate and never use) of say 2004-2032 (can only guess of course).

‘Kitz gives us a picture of how it was on the front lines during that second era.’

[kitz]

For me, the DSL era started circa 2002. 

I can remember being quite involved in Ben Verwayen's "BB4" campaigns for a few of our local exchanges during tail end of 2002
This exchange hit it's target Jan 2003 and went live end April.  By the end of 2003 all our local exchanges had hit target.   
There were still a few more outlying rural areas which were really struggling - but I believe B4RN have an interest in those now.

There's a brief resume here of us getting adsl in the UK.

>>  ‘broadband’ (a word which I hate and never use).

Must admit I stuck to my guns for many years - you will see parts of the site still sectioned as 'adsl',  but had to change due to popular consensus about 5yrs ago and after the general public didn't have a clue what adsl was due to the 'Fibre broadband' fiasco which is another topic entirely.
adslguide also had to change their name to thinkbroadband for the same reason. 

[burakkucat]

The word "broadband" was coined (in Beattie Bellman's terms) to differentiate from a "baseband" service.

Nowadays I tend to just use xDSL, unless a specific "flavour" needs to specified . . . in which case I'll spell it out (and quote the matching ITU-T G.99n recommendation, in parenthesis).

[sevenlayermuddle]

So far as I recall from the days when employers were foolish enough to pay me for my endeavours, “broadband” had a meaning, predating internet access.  From wikipedia, at this moment  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband

In telecommunications, broadband is wide bandwidth data transmission which transports multiple signals and traffic types. The medium can be coaxial cable, optical fiber, radio or twisted pair.

I think it can be argued that DSL, being DMT, consists of  “multiple signals”, and therefore qualifies as broadband.   I’m not sure the same applies to FTTP, and so not convinced whether FTTP is really broadband.    Note “not sure” and “not convinced”, ie no strong opinion, so don’t beat me up too hard if you can present contradictory evidence. 

The same wiki paragraph goes on to acknowledge to modern, imo nonsensical use of the term...

In the context of Internet access, broadband is used to mean any high-speed Internet access that is always on and faster than dial-up access over traditional analog or ISDN PSTN services.

[Weaver]

In the ancient days to me ‘broadband’ meant the opposite of ‘narrow band’, ie using a wider frequency range and was all about the amount of deviation from some centre frequency.

My ADSL world started very late, didn’t get ADSL here until summer 2004 0.5/0.5 Mbps fixed, but a lot of places around here were rather later than that, and for several years these unfortunates on some local exchanges had only had a choice of one ISP. Incredible.

When I was working as a local consultant, I didn’t use the term ‘broadband’ with any of my customers at all, I just said ‘fast internet access’ or ‘internet access’. And that was something that people could understand with no problem at all, in fact a lot easier and less geeky than ‘broadband’ anyway. Some of my business users could not get DSL yet and had to put up with twin-channel ISDN, with the BT anytime flat rate phone charge thing. (I too was on that BT anytime £45 thing, per month infinite zero rate calls to your ISP.)