How to Choose and Change your Internet Provider
We discuss the various choices that you need to make when selecting a broadband provider. How to get the best deal, and how to switch.
Listen to FrequencyCast Show 58 - Choosing Broadband |
Choosing Broadband:
A transcript of our Broadband feature from Show 58:
Carl:
And now it's time to focus - what are you going to beguile me with today?
Pete:
It's all about broadband, isn't it?
Carl:
Well, obviously, yeah. What about broadband?
Pete:
Well, as you know, we always open up Focus to our audience to tell us what they'd like us to talk about. Broadband came up as a fairly common theme, so what we're going to do today is talk a little bit about your broadband, and find out if you're getting the best deal, and if you're not, what you should do about it.
Carl:
OK, so you're going to tell me how to better my broadband deal as well as tell me about a good existing deal? So what if I don't have broadband already - what do I look for?
Pete:
I'm going to give you five tips. The first four are relevant to someone that's either an existing broadband user or a new broadband user - things that you need to know. Now, the first one is thinking about whether you need anything else with your broadband, such as your home phone and your TV service.
Carl:
OK, is that the only sort of additions I can have, or is there more?
Pete:
Well, there's mobile phones as well. So if you've got an Orange mobile phone, you might want to think about Orange home broadband; the same with O2 mobile phones and O2 broadband, but I'm actually thinking more of things like TV and home phone. So a lot of people, if they have their phone with BT, they may think about getting their broadband from BT - not always the best thing to do. As we know, there's ten million Sky subscribers in the UK, and if you are a Sky subscriber, looking at Sky's broadband isn't a bad option.
Carl:
OK, that's a fair point. Why?
Pete:
Well, mainly because it's free.
Carl:
Oh, I see - so you're not paying much.
Pete:
If you get your telly from Sky already, and you're looking for a broadband provider or you want to save yourself a bit of money, switching to Sky's broadband could be the answer. They actually give you free internet up to 20 megabits per second, which is actually a fairly fast speed if you can get it in your area, and it is free, which makes it a good one to consider. So do think about combining your phone, your TV and your broadband into a package - it generally works out cheaper if you do that.
Carl:
That was interesting, you mentioned about megabytes, broadband and speeds or something. What do I need to look for for speeds? Are there any important factors I need to be aware of here?
Pete:
Speed is a bit of a tricky one. Virgin are on a bit of a campaign about speeds at the moment, because what you'll normally see is speeds of up to 8 megabits per second, up to 20 megabits per second, up to 50 megabits per second, but you very rarely get those speeds. This is something Virgin are really pushing at the moment. They've launched something called ... now, let me get this up on the laptop for you, hang on a second ... so what is that site there called?
Carl:
"Stopthebroadband.com", or is that "con"?
Pete:
Stopthebroadbandcon. This is something Richard Branson and Virgin has launched. If you go to that particular site, you can see a "check how fast my speed is" button, and a petition, but basically this is to badger the existing internet providers, other than Virgin, to be genuine about their speeds. Now, where I live, I get can up to 20 meg broadband.
Carl:
Can I just ask, surely this is Trades Description that we're talking about here? - if they're telling you it's one thing and it's not actually providing what they say?
Pete:
This is the clever thing about this use of "up to", so "up to 20 megs" could be one meg.
Carl:
That's a little bit naughty, don't you think? Richard Branson - go for it, as always.
Pete:
Virgin here say, "You deserve the truth from all ISPs, and we're urging the Advertising Standards Authority to put a stop to misleading broadband advertising once and for all. Sign this petition." And if he gets enough people signing this petition, we could well see an end to this, "up to 20 meg" thingy, and an obligation on these ISPs to provide real information before you sign up.
Carl:
That sounds like a good deal to me - I mean, it's a bit stupid that people can actually advertise incorrectly and get your custom.
Pete:
To an extent, I can kind of sympathise with the ISPs. For a start, it's your distance from the phone exchange that makes a big difference. If you're a long old way from the phone exchange, you're not going to get up to the top speed. If you've got the phone exchange on your doorstep, the chances are you can get a very fast connection.
Carl:
But as you said before, if you are a long way from your exchange, all you do is, you lean out, grab the wire, and pull it closer to you, don't you?
Pete:
Of course - everyone does that.
Carl:
Well I do, since you told me to.
Pete:
So to an extent I can sympathise. Also you've got things like the state of the wiring between your house and the phone exchange, and also stuff inside your house can all cause problems. So it is difficult for these companies to actually give you an accurate prediction as to what your speed's going to be, but absolutely, I think it's fairly shoddy that something like an "up to 20 meg" service really only comes to a couple of meg by the time it actually gets to your house and onto your computer.
Carl:
Not so good, but how important is this speed really?
Pete:
Well, bit of a mixed one. If you're just doing surfing and emails, then to be honest, you can get away with one or two meg, because you're really limited by the speed of the web server at the other end and the general slowness of the internet. You might have a 20 meg connection to your phone exchange, but if the connection to the server you're connecting to is slower, you're never really going to get the benefit. There's always some kind of choke point in the system.
Where speed is important, though, is if you're doing online gaming, or if you're doing any kind of video work. So if you're watching live TV, or you're downloading and watching movies, that's where the speed can really make a difference. But to be honest, five or six meg should be enough to do that kind of thing. People that are paying over the odds for 20 or even 50 meg broadband probably aren't really using it unless they're very intense users, or they've got multiple people connecting and streaming video all at the same time.
Carl:
Fair enough, so more of a family thing, really, that you need to be concerned with?
Pete:
So what I would say is, take a look at the Stopthebroadbandcon website and sign up. BT have actually leapt in and said, yeah, Virgin are being a little bit devious here. Virgin publish their stats, so if we look at their current stats for the last month, which at the time of recording would be October, their advertised speeds here, up to 10 meg, 9.37 meg; up to 20 meg, 18.61 meg. So they're blatant - they actually publish what their average speeds are, and they're pretty close to the numbers they're talking about, aren't they?
Carl:
Yeah, they seem quite honest figures.
Pete:
But BT have leapt in to defend themselves, and they've said, yeah, but Virgin tend to concentrate in the heavily densely populated areas of the UK, whereas BT has an obligation to get their connections to the middle of nowhere, and by default, if they have to serve everyone, a lot of people are going to be slower than if they're in the major urban groups like Virgin cover.
Carl:
That's also a fair point.
Pete:
So that's speed. The next thing to bear in mind is your download cap.
Carl:
Is that from a festival, a Download festival cap? I don't know - a baseball cap?
Pete:
So most internet providers will give you some kind of download limit. You're only allowed to download a certain amount each month. This is where savings can be made - if you've bought a big package, but you're looking to save a little bit, you might find downgrading to a slightly lower package will be the answer. Normally the speed'll stay the same, but if you drop to a lower package, you'll find you have less gigabytes per month allowance.
Carl:
OK, so that's not so good?
Pete:
It does depend what you use. Now, a lot of providers offer you an unlimited download service, if you're prepared to pay top whack, but again I wonder how many people really get anywhere near that maximum download allowance. Sure, people watching TV on the internet all the time, or films all the time, are going to get close to that, but the average user probably doesn't actually use that much.
Carl:
OK - so the capping's not such a big deal.
Pete:
The only one where it is a bit of a big deal is if you go for the one we talked about earlier, so we said Sky was a good bargain - yes?
Carl:
Yep.
Pete:
But they only give you two gig a month, which is actually the lowest of the packages around.
Carl:
Oh, I see. And if you're on Sky, you probably do want to watch a load of movies.
Pete:
In some cases, getting the cheapest one with Sky isn't necessarily the answer. Do you know how much gig you would use, if you had a broadband connection at home?
Carl:
Three?
Pete:
OK, let me give you some numbers. Downloading a music track: 4 megabytes; downloading a podcast, like ours: about 25 megabytes; downloading a film: 225 megabytes; and the biggie is watching online TV, so things like the iPlayer and the like. If you sit and watch three hours of TV streamed, that would be your 2 gigs done for your month.
Carl:
Wow - so that's a big megabyte-thirsty really, isn't it?
Pete:
It certainly can be, streaming can be very thirsty, definitely.
Carl:
Right - so you really want a package that doesn't have much of a capping limit?
Pete:
Potentially, but then of course you pay more for that. What I would suggest is a good thing to do - let me just show you this on my laptop, hang on a second ... right, you see this little toolbar icon here, let me just click on that, there you go - what does that say?
Carl:
Download summary? - and it's got a start date, an end date, downloads to date and the space remaining. So in your example, you've got 17th November through to 18th November, and then you've got your downloads to date, 163 megabytes - wow, you've been busy, haven't you? What are you downloading nowadays? And space remaining, you've got 84%, which is not bad going.
Pete:
Mostly downloading podcasts, it has to be said. So these things are free, stick them on your toolbar, free installation, and just keep an eye on how much you're using. You might find you're not using as much as you think, and dropping down to a slightly lower usage allowance is going to save you some dosh. We'll stick up some links on our show notes to some of these free tools.
Carl:
That's a brilliant idea, yeah - especially at this time when people want to save money, that would be really useful. So, I need to know, though, with all these services, we're really interested in what we get after, like customer service, because there's no point having any connection made if there's problems with it as soon as you've had it done, and then you try and talk to people and then you don't have a service. So effectively there's always that opportunity to go and get a different service which you wouldn't maybe go for, based on the fact of customer service - who's the best for that?
Pete:
How long's a piece of string? There's been lots of complaints about all of the internet providers. TalkTalk tend to get a bad rap; BT tend to get a bit of a bad rap on their customer service. The one that's interesting at the moment, "Support From Yorkshire - good, honest broadband from Yorkshire" - have you seen the campaign?
Carl:
No, I haven't - but do they make tea as well?
Pete:
I think what they're getting at is so many of these companies now outsource their technical support to other countries. Plusnet in the UK are pushing good old honest broadband from their Yorkshire call centres.
Plusnet's 2010 Yorkshire Broadband Campaign
Carl:
Isn't that a foreign country as well anyway, though?
Pete:
Careful - one of our listeners is from Yorkshire.
Carl:
Eh up!
Pete:
On the customer services subject, this is something we'd like to do. We've just put together a survey asking our listeners who they're with, what package they're on, and how happy they are with the service. So go to our website, take a look at the survey - we'd love to know what you think.
HELP: Take part in our new Broadband Survey (Just 5 questions) - results so far
Carl:
So - the big, and most important, question for me - who is, after all this, the cheapest?
Pete:
If you just want a cheap broadband service, no frills, you don't want all the flashy gadgets and gimmicks, you don't want your TV and your phone with them - actually, let's have a quick look. I'm looking at uSwitch here - let me just put in my postcode, one I prepared earlier. Here we go, so O2, Orange, Sky, Virgin, BT, TalkTalk and Plusnet. Ah - cheapest, Plusnet - speeds of up to 20 megs, 10 gig usage limit, £6.49 a month, which is pretty low.
Carl:
That sounds very low to me.
Pete:
Only a 12 month contract, and a £25 connection charge, which over the year would come to £102. If we look at Sky, if we discount the completely free one because it doesn't have enough bandwidth and you have to be with Sky, there you're talking about £180 a year; Virgin £215 a year; BT £191 a year; Orange £180 a year; O2 £142 a year. So looking at this, Plusnet comes out tops in our area.
Carl:
Wow. So you've just got to type your postcode in, and you can find out for your own area, yeah?
Pete:
At the moment, Plusnet are offering the cheapest broadband out there, plus of course their lovely Yorkshire support.
Carl:
I like the Yorkshire support alone. What about if you want to switch from one provider to the next? - do you have to wait for your contract to end?
Pete:
Yeah, if you're in a contract, you've got to wait until that ends, or pay to get out of it. If you do want to move, it's fairly straightforward - you talk to your existing broadband provider and you ask for a MAC - a "migration authorisation code". You then give that code to your new provider, and the switch will happen fairly transparently.
Carl:
What happens when you switch - is it a pain, or is this like a three, four day process? How quickly does that happen?
Pete:
I've done it and it's happened in a week. Typically you might find yourself getting a new router, which means you've got to unplug the old one and plug a new one in. You will quite often have to change your email address settings - the outgoing email address thingy will probably change if you change provider. The only unfortunate thing is you do tend to lose your email address, which is a bit of a nuisance.
Carl:
Yeah, that's not very helpful, because you have to re-establish - it's a bit like getting a new mobile phone, isn't it, or a sim card?
Pete:
Exactly. One little tip I'd like to pass on, and everyone of our listeners should do this - what do you think that is?
Carl:
Buy a computer?
Pete:
Buy their own web domain.
Carl:
Oh, of course - yes. I've got one, haven't I?
Pete:
You have. If you're looking to change providers, you lose your email address, so what you need to do is buy yourself what's called a vanity domain name.
Carl:
OK.
Pete:
So that could be something like JohnSmith.me.co.uk, or something similar to that; a web address that has your own name at the end of it, your name.co.uk or me.uk. Buy that - you don't have to have a website with it, it's an email forwarding thing as well. So you buy yourself one of those, cost you £2 or £3 a year, and then you can point it to whatever email address you want - to a Hotmail address, to a Google Mail address, to a BT, to a Plusnet, to a Virgin address. If you change providers, you keep the email address, and you just point it somewhere else.
Carl:
Oh, that's a clever idea - it saves a lot of hassle.
Pete:
And everyone should do it - I urge everyone in the sound of my voice to get themselves a domain. We've set up a page on how to do this on our website. Go to the shownotes for today's show, and have a look at our three point step on how to get your own email address domain name.
How to Get Your Own Domain Name
Carl:
Well, thank you for that, and of course if you don't want to do that, you don't have to go to our website.
Listen to FrequencyCast Show 58 - Choosing Broadband |
More information:
- Broadband Basics - Our page of advice on Broadband Internet
- Broadband Usage Survey - We asked our listeners to tell us about their broadband
- Broadband Help - Covered in Show 41
- Plusnet Interview - We talk to the boss of UK ISP Plusnet
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