IT’S amazing how you get used to something that hardly existed a year or two ago and how much you miss it when it goes wrong.

Broadband was a name that few of us knew, let alone had access to in our homes.

But now just about everyone knows what it means and depends on it for a whole range of needs: email communications, fast information from the Internet, business transactions, to name but a few.

In other words, it has become as vital a domestic tool as the washing machine, as crucial a school facility as a blackboard and as important a business device as the fax machine once was.

The broadband revolution in Kent is moving fast. Most if not all exchanges are enabled. After a laggardly start, BT got its act together following pressure from Kent County Council, our sister paper Kent Business and local groups.

So to be deprived of broadband causes real concern.

And that concern applied to scores of subscribers in Downswood, a part of Maidstone. After a thunderstorm, they all lost broadband access, but few knew about the other’s plight.

Long conversations to call centres from Bombay to Bristol made precious little difference. Routings were tested, new modems sent out but the problem was the same.

Internet Service Providers like Wanadoo and Tiscali blamed BT, BT blamed Wanadoo and Tiscali. BT said lines were working perfectly. No one took responsibility. No one sent out an engineer immediately, as would usually happen with other utilities.

Crucially, ISPs failed to spot the high number of problems in the same area.

Three weeks of persistent badgering by parish council chairman Roz Cheesman, who was also affected, finally brought out a BT engineer.

At last, BT acknowledged there was a fault at the exchange and the problem was put right.

But why did it take three weeks, why did no one spot the geographical cluster, why did ISPs fail to act more quickly or communicate properly with subscribers?

It raises the question of whether BT equipment can cope with the broadband explosion. And why didn’t BT have the technology to identify an exchange fault?

But what relief when it came back – for most of us (there are one or two ongoing problems).

As Mrs Cheesman put it: "We are rejoicing as we have broadband connection and therefore able to send and receive emails for the first time since the storms."

It seems we just can’t live without it!