Broadband Org

Broadband Providers are always coming up with new and interesting was of attracting customers in a crowded market , just look at Orange giving away Free Laptops for instance. But are these Deals as good a buy as they may look at first? you can in some cases end up paying more than you initially thought as there is few pitfalls and hidden costs to look out for

We have made a list of things to keep in mind when considering a broadband package.

Free Broadband

Just like most things that claim to be free , its not! broadband companies like Orange , Talk Talk , Sky have been offering “Free” broadband for a while now but to get Free broadband you have to subscribe to one or more of their other Services like (Sky TV or Talk Talk phone line). These bundle deals do represent great value for money if you already subscribe to a qualifying service but you need to be sure you couldnt get the service cheaper when taken separately elsewhere.

If you do decide to go for one of these bundles then the second thing to look out for is the download limit included on your free Broadband which can be as low as 2GB which could see you hit with extra bandwidth charges if you are anything more than an low user.

Broadband Speeds

It is fairly rare to get the exact Speed advertised by your Provider for example you will see providers offering up to 8Mb broadband , in reality in a recent survey of 300 “up to 8Mb” users the average speed was just 2.7Mbps and the worst was a mere 0.9Mbps (read more here) . The maximum download speed for your connection is determined by many factors , one of the main ones being your phone lines distance from the exchange - use our broadband postcode checker to find this out and for a rough estimate of the speeds you can expect.

At the end of the day you could be paying extra for faster speeds that you wont get !

If you want to test the speed of your current connection use our Broadband Speed Test

Download Limits

Pretty much all Broadband Packages have download limits even if they don’t make this abundantly clear when you sign up. While you may be getting Super Fast broadband for under a tenner, when it comes with a download limit of 2GB per month you would need to be careful of what you use the connection for as you could easily exceed this with very little effort for example if you download a few movies a month or play a lot of online games. A 2GB limit is ok for people checking email and web browsing downloading some music etc. but if you are medium to heavy user it would not be suitable and would result in extra bandwidth charges

Unlimited Broadband ( Fair Use Policy)

In our opinion this is one of the sneakiest things broadband providers advertise, “Unlimited Broadband” should be unlimited right? wrong! they are almost alway subject to a “Fair Use Policy” which if you search through the small print may mean that if they think you are using your “unlimited” connection excessively then your provider may take the appropriate a action which can range from issuing a warning, throttling your connection during peak times, putting you in a pool of other high users to fight it 0ut for the bandwidth or even worse terminate your contract .

Make sure you read the small print to see what exactly each providers deems excessive use and what the consequences might be

18 Month contracts

You may notice some providers offering special deals for signing up to a 18 month broadband contract while this may look appealing remember that you will be locked in to that provider during the 18 month term and you may have to pay penalties if you need to get out early (e.g if you move house). Also in an ever changing broadband market do you want to be tied in for that long with out being able to switch freely?

Line Rental

Most people forget that you need to factor this into the cost of broadband as they already pay for their phone, but you cant have ADSL broadband without a phone line and you are looking at about