(FORTUNE Magazine) – Christine Price remembers the moment when she said, "Enough." It was June and her six-month-old ad agency was racing to crank out a 14-page brochure for a client she needed to please, a major financial house. The document was due at the production shop in two hours. A freelance designer had just sent her a file stuffed with 25 hand-drawn illustrations, images in multiple colors, and layouts in different fonts. It was ready to be downloaded.

She sat in front of her IBM ThinkPad and heard the familiar ear-splitting crackle of her 56K dial-up modem making its connection, and waited. And waited. "Talk about panic. I'm staring at the computer screaming, 'Faster! Faster! Faster! What do you mean you crashed? You can't crash!'"

Over the five hours it took to download the multimegabyte file, all Price could do was chew on pencils and stare out her unwashed floor-to-ceiling windows at the Providence skyline. Thanks to a nice guy named Brian at the production shop, she got the job done. But after six months of frustration with her slow, dial-up modem, Price couldn't take it anymore. "That's when I said, 'Enough,' and made the decision to get broadband."

Now there's no turning back. Price loves her DSL line so much that she's getting hooked up at her Boston condo too. With a faster connection, she expects to be working more from home. That's a good thing, she says, because she won't have to travel to Providence every day. Plus clients can get pretty demanding, and you never know when you'll have to squeeze in a few hours of work. "Anytime you speed up service, people expect it faster," she says. "Go back a few years when we were only working with FedEx, getting it the next day was great. Now from our clients it's, 'What do you mean I won't get it today?' "

It's inevitable. If the technology exists to work faster, you work faster. You do it because it pleases your client, your boss, yourself, whatever the cost. As more offices and homes get broadband hookups, more workers are finding they can do their jobs faster and with greater flexibility. The big bandwidth pipeline that carries data from one point to another has liberated people from the office, allowing them to work from home or outside metropolitan business centers or as their own free agents.

If not for broadband, Nick Kierstead might still be shackled to his desk at ad firm Mezzina-Brown, where he spent nine years as a Website designer and creative director. A year ago he up and quit. He now runs his own interactive multimedia game company, which would have been impossible without the near-exponential increase in information traffic capacity that broadband offers. Kierstead now hosts his own Website and a private server for client work from home. His broadband hookup, he says, "allows me to look more like a company than an individual."

In cyberspace at least. Inside Kierstead's apartment in lower Manhattan it's another story. He might stay up until midnight designing Web pages and then roll out of bed late and stumble over to click on the 35-inch TV near one of his five computers. Or take the afternoon off to rollerblade. He moved into the 950-square-foot apartment about a year ago when he decided to go solo. The view of the Statue of Liberty from his living room window was nice, but the real plus was that the building was going to be wired with a T1 line for high-speed Internet access.

People like Kierstead, with their wired-up lives, provide a window into the future, says telecom analyst and Internet prognosticator Jeff Kagan. "This is a fundamental shift between the old dial-up world and having to be at your home or office to the always-on digital data network where you are always connected to everyone all the time."

For those caught in the gears of that shift, like venture capitalists Craig Greenberg and Stephen Dawahare, the view to the future can be frustratingly obscured. Until recently the pair ran their $50 million fund, iVisionary, from two locations in Kentucky; Greenberg, the COO, was in Louisville and had a cable hookup, while Dawahare, the CEO, worked in Lexington with a dial-up modem. Greenberg's souped-up connection sometimes made him the de facto deal driver, much to Dawahare's chagrin. "There are times when we're on a conference call and a company gets mentioned," says Greenberg. "Because of broadband, I can be on the SEC site in seconds checking out revenue streams and then asking informed questions. He can't do that." The two were recently considering making a multimillion-dollar investment in a company called Managed Objects. They had one hour left to phone the bankers to give a thumbs up, but first they wanted to look at an important PowerPoint presentation about the company, and it had just arrived via e-mail. "We have an hour left, and it takes me 45 minutes to download the thing when Craig had it instantly," CEO Dawahare recalls. "[And] I'm the decision-maker." Dawahare now has a broadband hookup.

As more people switch to broadband once they experience firsthand the inadequacy of their dial-up, they may also start to feel broadband's potential to attach a ball and chain to the job. Always on can mean always available. As a vice president at one of the largest broadband service providers, SBC Communications, Jason Few knows from dial-up. When he took a week off to help his wife care for their newborn son, his high-speed line was handy in getting work done during the odd free moment--work he couldn't do with a slow dial-up connection, such as tinkering with visual presentations. But at other times working from home means just that. "I'm not a doctor, but I feel like I'm always on call," Few says with a sigh. "Doctors get two, three days off a week. I don't get that break."

Which raises the question, In a world where Internet access will soon be constant and nearly instant, will we be better off?

The question, according to some, is moot. "The boundaries are dropping between our workspaces and our private spaces, and we get confused whether we are victims or we are making choices," says James Gleick, author of the book Faster. "Certainly we need to alert ourselves to the dangers of having everything available to us all the time, but whether or not you or I think it's a good thing or a bad thing is beside the point."

Broadband and the Internet will soon inextricably thread their way into the fabric of our everyday lives whether we like it or not. For San Francisco Web designer Ben Sutherland, they already have. Encircled by his three laptops and multiple computer drives, Sutherland takes full advantage of all that his high-speed connection offers. "I can have three or four chat rooms open, talk on the phone, and browse the Internet all at once," he boasts. "But then again, there are days when I look up and it's ten at night and I haven't even taken a shower."

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