Like my fellow IT Week columnist Bill Pechey, I too live in a village that late last year saw BT set a trigger level for the local telephone exchange to be upgraded to support broadband Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) services. The required number of pre-registrations was reached within six weeks of BT's announcement, and the carrier has now said it will upgrade the exchange by 28 April.

There is an obvious delight in knowing that my days of browsing the internet and transmitting large files between my study and my workplace at data speeds of 56kbit/s or less are numbered. But the grouch within me can't help feeling a slight sense of loss at the demise of what had become my favourite complaint, targeted inevitably at the company that, with the possible exceptions of Microsoft and Cisco, more people in the IT industry love to hate than any other.

Ingratitude aside, BT's decision to upgrade exchanges it previously considered unviable for DSL, coupled with its recent price cuts for wholesale services, are positive steps towards the ideal of a Broadband Britain - a modern, connected state supporting a thriving economy on the back of high-speed internet access to every home and business in the land.

But while Bill and I join the growing ranks of erstwhile dissenters that BT has now pacified, it is necessary to ask whether the UK's broadband divide is now on its way to being completely eliminated, or just narrowed.

The more exchanges that are upgraded, the less criticism BT will receive for what has been a conspicuously piecemeal DSL coverage policy over the past few years. And the carrier will continue to serve only those communities that it feels can provide it with a healthy financial return on the investment it makes in upgrading exchanges. Smaller settlements where the pool of potential DSL subscribers is too small to yield sufficient profit margins will continue to be overlooked, left with the unattractive choice of using either slow ISDN or expensive and unreliable satellite broadband links.

The spread of DSL to more parts of the UK does not necessarily sound the death knell for wireless broadband completely, although DSL may effectively corner the residential market.

As the government opens up more wireless frequencies for commercial applications, as it will shortly do with the 5.8GHz waveband, the scope to use wireless links as higher-capacity alternatives to leased lines in the enterprise sector grows. More wireless options, in the form of WiMax and third-generation mobile data services, are also on the way, although they may not make any impact until 2005 or later.

The expansion of DSL may bring long-awaited broadband access to me and thousands of other teleworkers and branch offices around the country during the next 12 months, but it will be interesting to see if the debate over the broadband divide is still raging this time next year.