Broadband commonly refers to an Internet connection that is faster than a dial-up Internet connection.  Broadband can be provided to an address by cable (copper, coaxial or fibre optic) or wireless (satellite, WiMax or WiFi, mobile data) and requires a modem at both the customer's premises and at the Internet Service Provider's (ISP's) premises.

A basic ADSL (Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line) broadband connection will achieve speeds of around 256 kbps (kilo bits per second) which is five times greater than a dial-up connection.

High speed broadband will achieve speeds many times faster than basic broadband - the government's objective is for speeds that are at least four times faster for everyone and 20 times faster for 80% of addresses.

The information below is provided by Wikipedia and the full text can be viewed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_Internet_access

Broadband Internet access, often shortened to just broadband, is a high data rate Internet access—typically contrasted with dial-up access using a 56k modem.

Dial-up modems are limited to a bitrate of less than 56 kbit/s (kilobits per second) and require the full use of a telephone line—whereas broadband technologies supply more than double this rate and generally without disrupting telephone use.

Although various minimum bandwidths have been used in definitions of broadband, ranging up from 64 kbit/s up to 2.0 Mbit/s^[1], the 2006 OECD report^[2] is typical by defining broadband as having download data transfer rates equal to or faster than 256 kbit/s, while the United States (US) Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as of 2009, defines "Basic Broadband" as data transmission speeds exceeding 768 kilobits per second (Kbps), or 768,000 bits per second, in at least one direction: downstream (from the Internet to the user’s computer) or upstream (from the user’s computer to the Internet).^[3] The trend is to raise the threshold of the broadband definition as the marketplace rolls out faster services.^[4]

Data rates are defined in terms of maximum download because several common consumer broadband technologies such as ADSL are "asymmetric"—supporting much slower maximum upload data rate than download.

"Broadband penetration" is now treated as a key economic indicator.^[2][5]