Broadband and mobile contract renewal time..

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stevewestern

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For many years we have been with BT for our landline, broadband (fibre halo 3) and mobiles - they do a family sim only deal and we have their maximum of 4 phones (plus a 5th now that isn't included in their family deal)
We do not use the landline so don't need it. Light use of mobiles, with 6gb of data for each phone. Unlimited texts and UK calls.
Home internet use doesn't need to be lightening fast as it's rare that there are more than 4 devices using it, so 30 - 40 Mb is ample.

However the renewal is up from £47.50 to £61.00 purely for the broadband and £42 for the 5 phones.

Is this getting expensive, and should I be looking elsewhere - having been happy just to let the contract renew over the years with the occasional call to get a reduction I'm not sure where to start looking - any advice please ?
 
£28 for 100/25Mb full fibre broadband with Vodafone here. We use Smarty for mobiles but Vodafone do a combined package.
 
I pay £20 for 78ishMb full fibre with BT (it's a social tariff)
£7 for 16Gb mobile data phone contact with Smarty.

If I had to get a full price broadband contract though it would 100% be Aquiss, no mid-contact price rises and fantastic service.
 
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£61 for broadband? You're being royally screwed over.

You no longer need a landline to get broadband, in fact I believe it is now impossible to get a landline and existing ones will be discontinued sometime next year.
Have a chat to Zen Internet. They have been rock solid for me and once you're in the price will never increase as long as you stay signed up.

I currently pay around £45 for 70mbps and a landline but we've just got rid of the landline phone and are switching to VOIP so will be ditching the landline soon which should save a bit.

They are currently advertising £36 for 70mbps or £32 for 30mbps (Speeds may vary depending on your location)
 
gramps said:
£28 for 100/25Mb full fibre broadband with Vodafone here. We use Smarty for mobiles but Vodafone do a combined package.
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robj20 said:
I pay £20 for 78ishMb full fibre with BT (it's a social tariff)
£7 for 16Gb mobile data phone contact with Smarty.

If I had to get a full price broadband contract though it would 100% be Aquiss, no mid-contact price rises and fantastic service.
Click to expand...

ecoleman said:
£61 for broadband? You're being royally screwed over.

You no longer need a landline to get broadband, in fact I believe it is now impossible to get a landline and existing ones will be discontinued sometime next year.
Have a chat to Zen Internet. They have been rock solid for me and once you're in the price will never increase as long as you stay signed up.

I currently pay around £45 for 70mbps and a landline but we've just got rid of the landline phone and are switching to VOIP so will be ditching the landline soon which should save a bit.

They are currently advertising £36 for 70mbps or £32 for 30mbps (Speeds may vary depending on your location)
Click to expand...
Thank you all for your replies, very helpful. I'll look into it tomorrow if I can, having a starting point is so helpful!
 
crikey moses for £47 i would want 200mb full fibre i am with virgin media for just BB and its £38 for 125mb but i can have 250mb for £48

as to the mobile phones depends are they SIM only of handsets included?

for SIM only £10 a month is about par for unlim min/text and 25gb / month
 
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I'm paying virgin £45 for 350mb BB, and £36 for three Sims on 02 (was with virgin again, but all went the 02 route) unlimited text and calls with 50gb data. But I do own the phones.
 
WE left BT last year and went for a company called " box broadband" who also do phone lines. BT can't provided fibre optics to our house in the forseeable future hence we chanded to a company that can. this private company offered a lot more as well ,such as unlimited call charge type of thing.
local to our ares of the UK shows areas covered

www.boxbroadband.co.uk

Help and Support - Box Broadband

www.boxbroadband.co.uk www.boxbroadband.co.uk
 
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I have NOW, it's budget and it works, I costs us £25 a month for 'up to' 68Mbs although we usually manage to obtain 58 or 59. It's only a year's contract so if I don't like it or someone other than our local fobre company, Wildanet -- who's administration is so bad they didn't repond when we asked, three times, to be connected, means that I'm not stuck in a two-year contract (like BT want).

There are so many providers out there that all use the same copper wires (assuming you aren't on fibre to the premises) so connection speeds are going to be pretty much the same whoever you go with.

We don't have a landline and previously hadn't used out landline phone for many years before we finally got rid of it.

This idea of providers putting up prices after a contract has expired seems rather self-defeating, it's almost as if they want to get rid of you after the term has expired. NOW boradband will do the same after a year and so I will then move whereas if they kept the same price on a month-by-month basis I'd probably stay with them for years.
 
ecoleman said:
£61 for broadband? You're being royally screwed over.

You no longer need a landline to get broadband, in fact I believe it is now impossible to get a landline and existing ones will be discontinued sometime next year.
Have a chat to Zen Internet. They have been rock solid for me and once you're in the price will never increase as long as you stay signed up.

I currently pay around £45 for 70mbps and a landline but we've just got rid of the landline phone and are switching to VOIP so will be ditching the landline soon which should save a bit.

They are currently advertising £36 for 70mbps or £32 for 30mbps (Speeds may vary depending on your location)
Click to expand...

Unless you have fibre-to-the-premises, you still need a landline but of course it's not on a separate rental anymore, I presume this is what you mean.

I had a look at ZEN internet and I'm afraid that where I live, their product falls far short of what I already have in that they want to charge me £32 per month for 14-24 Mbs whereas I pay £25 per month and get 58-59 Mbps. Quite why their offering is so expensive and so slow I can't imagine.
 
ShinySideUp said:
Unless you have fibre-to-the-premises, you still need a landline but of course it's not on a separate rental anymore, I presume this is what you mean.

I had a look at ZEN internet and I'm afraid that where I live, their product falls far short of what I already have in that they want to charge me £32 per month for 14-24 Mbs whereas I pay £25 per month and get 58-59 Mbps. Quite why their offering is so expensive and so slow I can't imagine.
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Yeah Zen seem really expensive when you can get Aquiss 75Mbps for £27.00 a month with no increases.
 
I'm with Giganet FTTP and get around 250-350mbit for £36, but that includes a couple of quid because I pay for a static IP address.

So far zero complaints, highly recommended.
 
ShinySideUp said:
Unless you have fibre-to-the-premises, you still need a landline but of course it's not on a separate rental anymore, I presume this is what you mean.

I had a look at ZEN internet and I'm afraid that where I live, their product falls far short of what I already have in that they want to charge me £32 per month for 14-24 Mbs whereas I pay £25 per month and get 58-59 Mbps. Quite why their offering is so expensive and so slow I can't imagine.
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That seems odd. They run off the openreach infrastructure so I can’t see why it would be any slower to what you are getting now. My guess is just that their speed estimator thing is wrong.

You do get a static ip with zen and their customer service is excellent.
 
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You’re really being ripped off, try calling BT before you do anything, tell them you’re leaving, they’ll put you through to a retention team who will negotiate a deal with you, I’ve done this every year for the past 15+ years, always get a reduction and, even got a free Samsung tablet thrown in a couple of years ago.
 
I had enough of BT. After being promised full fibre last September, then promised again for Dec and recently receiving a message saying I can get it in March this year I'm glad I ditched them. Since last September I went with Brillband (using City Fibre).

FTTP 900Mbps up and down. £35 per month. So far it's been crazy reliable. Brillband have amazing customer service as well.
 
ecoleman said:
That seems odd. They run off the openreach infrastructure so I can’t see why it would be any slower to what you are getting now. My guess is just that their speed estimator thing is wrong.

You do get a static ip with zen and their customer service is excellent.
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I find that broadband companies in general have wildly varying estimations of speed but I have to say that ZEN was the lowest I've ever seen that couldn't be improved by paying more. Some companies offer lower speed for less money but I've never seen one here that only has the lower speed; it's also quite expensive for this area. But never mind, there is plenty of choice.
 
Pete Allen said:
You’re really being ripped off, try calling BT before you do anything, tell them you’re leaving, they’ll put you through to a retention team who will negotiate a deal with you, I’ve done this every year for the past 15+ years, always get a reduction and, even got a free Samsung tablet thrown in a couple of years ago.
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Ha, I've been listening to their on-hold music for ages, and it's really not my type of music.........!
I did manage to get them to refund the £120 they had overcharged me this morning, but wanted to keep the renewal as a separate call until I'd actually received confirmation of them doing it - should have kept on the line!

Thank you all for your replies by the way.
 
For this much ££ you can have 1gbps fibre optic direct connection as long as you have infrastructure in place. Most places now have or about to get it.
There is no way I would sign up for sub 70mbps copper for anything over £20 and a very short contract. The tech is dead in the water. It may be enough for now but then you should pay accordingly
 
LongLensPhotography said:
For this much ££ you can have 1gbps fibre optic direct connection as long as you have infrastructure in place. Most places now have or about to get it.
There is no way I would sign up for sub 70mbps copper for anything over £20 and a very short contract. The tech is dead in the water. It may be enough for now but then you should pay accordingly
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UK FTTP is currently 61.3% (as of 24th Jan 2023, https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/ ), which is over 50%, so technically counts as 'most', that's still a large % that can't get that sort of speed.
 
I can only get 36 Mb here and I live in a pretty well built up area but its nearly all copper to the house.
Virgin do have the infrastructure here but I refuse to deal with those bunch of incompetent fools.
 
LongLensPhotography said:
For this much ££ you can have 1gbps fibre optic direct connection as long as you have infrastructure in place. Most places now have or about to get it.
Click to expand...

No they are not. There is still 40% of the country without FTTP and no plans in sight for getting it anytime soon. We bought our house 5 years ago and some of the houses we looked at were only getting 0.5mbps at best.

LongLensPhotography said:
There is no way I would sign up for sub 70mbps copper for anything over £20 and a very short contract. The tech is dead in the water. It may be enough for now but then you should pay accordingly
Click to expand...

The tech is only dead in the water if you can get FTTP
Come and live here and try ordering anything above 70mbps, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
70mbps is cutting edge here.
 
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firewireguy said:
Seems a bit overkill for home use. And over gigabit switching kit is still quite pricy.
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2.5Gb stuff isn't too pricey.
I'm more interested in the price of the slower speeds coming down.
 
I have to say that the only time I really need giga bit speeds is when downloading games from Steam, which isn't often. In our house, I am on the internet upstairs via ethernet cable and the wife is downstairs over wifi, plus the TV might be streaming over the net too, but we don't get buffering under normal circumstances, which is why I didn't pursue our local fibre company when they let me down with the primary installation. Sixty Mb/s seems perfectly adequate and as robj20 says, I'd be far more interested in a lower price for my non-fibre speeds. As it is I only pay £25 per month, but my contract ends at the end of May so will have to look around yet again :headbang:
 
I've just spent far too much time with virgin media on chat. But manged to get my package down to £78 per month, they wanted £116!. That's bb at 350mb, phone, 2 tv boxes with mega tv and Inc TNT sport. Mind you it was hard work to get it at that price.
 
£29 for shell energy [now octopus] and I get 207mb, its fine for my needs, but when 18 months is up I will be checking again for another deal, loyalty does not pay to appears anymore.
 
sajo said:
£29 for shell energy [now octopus] and I get 207mb, its fine for my needs, but when 18 months is up I will be checking again for another deal, loyalty does not pay to appears anymore.
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Never did. Look at car insurance, every year I have to trawl the comparison sites or pay through the nose for the same cover. I think the only exception is house and contents insurance because we've been with the same company for years and the premiums have hardly varied.

I will just get this years motorcycle and car insurance in before I'm 70 as I am led to believe that at age 70 I become a terrible liability with accidents everywhere; one day I'm a mature and responsible driver, aged 69 and the next, I am 70 -- old, half-blind, doddery and a menace to other road users.
 
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