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Broadband necessary for life

More than a quarter of Britons said they couldn’t live without their dial-up or broadband internet connection, a recent survey from pollsters YouGov suggests.

The poll, conducted in association with directory service 118 118, found that people could not live without their internet connection for more than a few days without feeling stressed or unhappy.

The survey, which asked people a series of questions related to their internet use, discovered that 44 per cent of people felt frustrated when they could not connect to their broadband service while 27 per cent reported feeling more stressed when their broadband or dial up internet was down.

Half of the 2,100 people questioned said that a faulty broadband connection would be worse than lacking gas, water or electricity. Furthermore, the same amount said their broadband internet connection was more important to them than religion.

Psychologist Dr David Lewis said: “The proliferation of broadband has meant for the first time in history we have entered a culture of ‘instant answers’ - a galaxy of information is just a mouse click away and we have become addicted to the web.”

The figures suggested that more than a quarter of Brits spend regularly over four hours a day online with most spending their time on social networking websites such as Facebook or MySpace.

Meanwhile, a recent study by an internet research group found that increased numbers of adults in the UK were spending more time online than watching television. In the survey by search engine Google two-thirds said they had increased their time online in the last year.

14/10/2008
Author: CompareBroadbandUK staff writer

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