...I'm sorry, but I would just HAVE to try and start it.

...but I haven't hit it yet.

You could have a 1.5Pbs (peta* bits per second) connection to your ISP, but when the rest of the Internet sucks, at what point does how big your pipe to your ISP become irrelevant.

I know that the big UK ISPs are all peered with the BBC so things like iPlayer don't even touch "the Internet" so it could be good from an IPTV point of view with established players, but that's only a transient benefit.

From a wider point of view, would I notice much difference between my current 8MB (give or take) ADLS and 1.5Gb fibre?

* lots of

Surely the validity of any evidence citing party x having IP address a.b.c.d at time t comes down the accuracy of the clock on the server that logged the IP address allocation.

How do you prove in court that clock on a logging server was correct.

I don't think you can.

It's a long time since I had any involvement in corporate IT networks; and I realise that a lot is easier said than done, but if I were designing one from scratch today; I wouldn't treat any physical internal employee work location (ethernet at the desk or office-wide WiFi) as being any different to the wider Internet.

This would enable an infrastructure to be set-up where protection was focussed around the core services and the communications channel between them and the accessing client rather than having to worry about what is actually going on at the employee's desktop; because even if you do restrict external Internet access your employees are just going use dongles or their mobile phones.