Not every area of the country can be provided with Broadband at the moment.
The way to find out whether you're covered (and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Birmingham was) is to go to
http://www.bt.com and have a look around for the Broadband heading. In there, you can enter your telephone number, and it will automatically tell you whether your BT Exchange is Broadband compatible.
Good luck - I think that less than 40% of the country is capable of having Broadband at the moment, and the quicker BT (and the Government, I dare say) do something about this, the better.
As for the rights and wrongs, don't believe all the hype about its speed capabilities - usually, Broadband delivers signals
up to ten times faster than your 56k modem - not always guaranteed to be super quick, of course. And as more and more exchanges are converted to digital ones, more and more people are gonna be shifting over to Broadband, which, once again, will clog up the system just like at present.
Shop around for prices. I suspect most high street stores these days are promoting broadband - check a few out; thumb through 'Which?' in WH Smiths and see if there are price comparisons - better still, check out 'Which? Online' and see what they have to say.
As for me here in Wales? Well, Broadband is a far-off dream. On the face of it, we've only just moved out of the dark ages here, and are getting used to this new contraption called 'electricity'!
:bounce: