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Get super-fast broadband for £3 a month


Updated on 28 October 2009 | 34 Comments

Why pay £15 a month or more to get online, when you can get an 8Mb broadband connection for just 10p a day?

A few months ago, something bordering on disaster happened to me: I lost my home broadband connection for nearly a week. My home is my workplace, so this could have caused endless problems. However, from adversity comes opportunity...

Shopping around for bargain broadband

Faced with the possibility of being unable to work at home, I did two things. First, I asked my neighbours on both sides if I could piggy-back on their wireless-broadband signal. They generously agreed and, within the hour, I was back online again.

Second, I decided that it was time to search the whole broadband market for a new supplier. My main goal was to find a reliable service offering reasonable bandwidth at an attractive price. My existing deal from Prodigy Networks cost £14.99 a month in return for an 8Mb service with a 2GB download limit (with each extra gigabyte charged at £1.50).

Three or four years ago, most users had a 2Mb connection, and 8Mb broadband was considered a luxury. Today, three in five households (60%) have an 8Mb connection. In fact, this should read 'up to 8Mb', because various technical issues will affect your 'true' connection speed.

Your actual connection speed will be affected by where you live (for best results, live in a big city), your distance from your local exchange (the shorter, the better), the time of day, and the number of connections to your service.

According to telecoms watchdog Ofcom, the average speed users get from an 8Mb service is around 3.6Mb, or less than half (45%) of the theoretical maximum. Check your actual speed with this broadband speed test.

Super-fast broadband for 10p a day

I was confident that I could find an 8Mb service with a much higher download limit for far less than I was paying before. Sure enough, after about 30 minutes of trawling through offers, I came across a great deal from award-winning ISP PlusNet. (Amusingly, PlusNet was bought by BT in January 2007 and thus competes with its new owner for customers.)

PlusNet Value offers 8Mb broadband with a 10GB download limit for £5.99 a month for the first three months. This includes a free wireless router (add £6.99 for postage and packing) and free connection, but you must have a BT landline to apply. After three months, if you live in a low-cost area (known as a 'market 3' exchange), then you continue to pay £5.99 a month, otherwise the price jumps to £11.99 a month.

In common with about four-fifths (80%) of the UK population, I live in a market 3 area, so my PlusNet broadband is £5.99 a month, or £71.88 a year. This is a saving of at least £108 a year, so I'm one happy customer. Even better, I applied via cashback website Quidco and got £36 cashback (reduced to £28), cutting the first-year cost to a mere £35.88, or under 10p a day!

All's well that ends well

I've found that my PlusNet connection is more than enough for web browsing, email and watching the odd programme on BBC iPlayer. What's more, my connection is very reliable -- an essential requirement, as both my wife and I work from home.

Note that PlusNet uses 'speed throttling' to control its traffic, which slows you down at busy times if your usage gets too heavy. Many ISPs apply this as part of their 'fair-usage policies'. Thankfully, I don't download lots of large files or stream a lot of television, so my 10GB monthly limit is way more than I need. However, anyone who does lots of downloading or P2P file-sharing may need a higher download limit.

Finally, when shopping around for broadband, do look into the bundled home phone, web and digital TV packages on offer from the likes of BT, Sky and Virgin Media. Although I'm not a fan of bundling in general, there are some cracking deals on offer for those willing and able to move their line rental to a new provider.

More: Search for cheaper broadband | Slash your energy bills | 35 things you can get for £5 or less

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  • 28 October 2009

    I know I get a false reading at over 100 MB/s I just tried the speed test. That is linked from the article it still gave me 7Mb/s which is about right. My local exchange is rated at 10 Mb/s. Incidentally 10p a day works out to £3.10 a month. I was just connected to a server in China and have to admit the video kept stopping. But normally I have no problems. I stream music and video from across the Atlantic and from Poland. TalkTalk has a bad reputation and their server is a shambles but it works most of the time. According to the server when I log in I have 1 email account and no web space! lol I have had a website on for years and I access 4 email accounts using POP3. 

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  • 28 October 2009

    Mike10613 said Try optimising your TCP if you aren't getting the speed you need on ADSL. You can get a free program. I went from 2 Mb/s to around 7 Mb/s. My best speed recently was over 100 Mb/s which I am told is impossible! lol from: http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php Mike, What you have linked to there is basically something that applies compression to your connection; it is essentially useless for boosting the speeds of real downloads as they are usually already compressed in some way or another. The reason it makes your speedtest seem to be so fast is because the speedtest works by sending a few MB of the same data down the line (say, 5MB worth of 0xFF bytes) - the compression results in you getting the instruction to simply "create" 5MB worth of 0xFF since they're all the same, and this causes your false reading. if you were to download a real file, clearly it won't be comprised of all 0xFF, and so, your compression wouldn't be able to give such a stunning result.

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  • 17 October 2009

    [b][url=http://www.lovemoney.com/profile/profilehandler.aspx?uid=22268]hfc53[/url],[/b] [i]"I'm with Utility Warehouse (for my sins!) [/i] [i]They promised the LLU 24mb.[/i] [i]I get 0.4meg on a good day!"[/i] [i]I'm sorry that you were promised 24mb. I don't promise customers 24mb- there are some exchanges which are set up for faster speeds, but most areas are not set up for that, even when LLU enabled. However, I have a faster connection than neighbours, and there was a significant increase in speed the day that I was unbundled, despite being on an 'up to 8mb' service before.[/i] [i]With a speed of only 0.4mb, I would have to say that the chances are that you would get a very slow connection from any[/i] provider. One analogy that I have heard is that broadband is a bit like a leaky pipe with regular holes. the longer pipe that water has to go through, the more holes there are to lose water, so the lower the pressure comes out of the end. If a pipe has a greater number of holes per meter, the pressure drops even more. Similarly, the further you are from the exchange and the worse the line between you and the exchange, the lower the broadband speed. "[i] Irrelevant of what anyone selling something says always FULLY check reviews and feedback about a company."[/i] OK, try reading leading independent consumer magazines that have no ways to make money from companies that they review- not many out there, but there is one household name. You mentioned getting lots of free calls, with the comment about the calls to UW. First of all, I would contact the distributor who signed you up in the first place, and get them to talk to head office on your behalf. I have always been happy to do this for my own customers, partly so that I know that any issues have been resolved (both issues for me have been on starting up energy, as meter readings have been problematical when the previous suppliers had not updated records when changing meters.) I'm new to the site, so I don't know if there is any way for you to contact me direct if I want me to try to help- obviously, there is no benefit to myself, as I cannot benefit from you as a customer if you are already a customer with UW. Secondly, an increasing number of my customers are getting a lot of free calls, often in excess of 15 hours a month. I get particularly good feedback from customers who come from countries not covered by free calls from any provider (usually the Philippines) who can get free calls from there to any UK landline with their package for a fixed fee. By the way, I'll be trying to report this post, so that moderators can decide whether it needs to be removed as potentially advertising my business.

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