A decent broadband deal is essential in the modern world, but there are plenty of ways you can end up paying too much for your package.
There’s no escaping the fact that we’ve all been incredibly reliant on our broadband connections over the last year.
It’s rather difficult to work from home without being able to make use of your email or hold those wonderful Zoom meetings with your colleagues, while we’ve also leaned heavily on things like streaming services for some entertainment at a time when we haven’t really been able to leave the house.
As a result, it’s become absolutely crucial to sign up to the right broadband package. However, there are plenty of small mistakes we can make that mean we end up paying more than we need to, or get stuck on a naff deal.
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Shopping around ‒ sort of
Using a price comparison site is a sensible way of shopping around, whether you’re looking for a car insurance policy, a credit card or a current account.
Plenty of us use them for broadband too, though there is an argument this is directing us towards the wrong deals.
CompareFibre, a price comparison site itself, has slated its rivals, arguing that they are omitting providers and pushing people towards deals that are more expensive and deliver less impressive speeds.
This comes down to alternative networks, or altnets as they are also known, which don’t rely on Openreach for their broadband infrastructure.
Instead, they use full-fibre, which means that the speeds they can provide users is staggering compared to that from other providers.
In its research, CompareFibre carried out searches on a range of price comparison sites for a host of different postcodes and found that while those sites flag up a bunch of deals, they usually ignore these altnets as they don’t have commercial relationships with them.
For a postcode in Reading, for example, CompareFibre found that the fastest deal around comes from a company called Zzoomm, which offers speeds of up to 2,000 Mbps.
Yet the fastest deals highlighted by the other sites was 300 Mbps.
This was repeated in other locations too, with CompareFibre concluding that they could be enjoying deals that are 20 times faster and half the price they are currently paying by expanding their search to include these little known providers.
So clearly if you want to get the best possible deal, it’s really important that you include these altnets in your research.
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When is my deal ending?
Rules were introduced by Ofcom, the communications regulator, a couple of years ago which force providers to notify broadband customers when their deal is ending and to flag up the best new deals open to them.
The idea is that these notifications ‒ which are sent out between 10 and 40 days before that deal ends – can help ensure that people don’t end up paying for deals which are no longer competitive and instead move to a better deal.
The trouble is, they aren’t being sent out properly.
A study by uSwitch last month found that while eight million households should have been sent one of these notifications since they were introduced, almost three million people whose deals have expired in the last 12 months haven’t received one.
And as a result, it means an awful lot of people have no idea that they could shift to a cheaper deal immediately.
Paying for more than you can get
A massive factor for any of us when comparing broadband deals is the speed of the connection on offer.
You’ll struggle to stream anything or get through a video call without suffering from buffering if your package is slow.
The trouble is that plenty of us have been duped into signing up for a package based on advertised speeds that bear little to no relation to the actual speeds we can get.
After all, there’s no point paying a premium for a ‘speedy’ package when your local infrastructure means that such speeds simply aren’t achievable in your home.
This is another area where the regulator has been active, with new protections in place to ensure that people are properly informed about the speeds they can get when signing up for a deal.
Providers that are signed up to Ofcom’s code of practice have now committed to giving a guaranteed speed before you sign up to a new deal, without having to ask for it.
They also promise to tell you what speeds to expect during peak times when most people are online and allow you to walk away from the deal without having to pay exit fees if speeds drop before the guaranteed level.
It’s worth highlighting that Plusnet has thus far decided against signing up to that code, so there remains a danger that you end up paying for more than you can get.
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