Out of contract and only have one ISP

Lwcus

I have been out of contract for several months but didn't realize it till now.

I am in rural North Wales and we do not have fiber of any flavor. We have ADSL, but not ADSL2 and it isn't really reliable. On a very good day (never a full week) we can get between 2 - 2.5 mbps,

but mostly it is between 1,0 - 1.75mbps. I have Amazon Prime mainly for the cheaper deliveries as I am disabled and housebound. Recently we have managed to watch some films (with buffering).

On searching the web for ADSL providers, I only get 1 ISP result, that being Plusnet, my current provider. How can I get a decent contract when they can say go elsewhere if I don't like it. I don't have any idea of what my options are. Being out of contract means they are charging close to double for my service. My pension won't allow  me to consider satellite. We don't have a good reception for mobiles and don't qualify for smart meters.I need some help, thank you.

Ron
Up in the beautiful mountains of North Wales

JSmithy45AD

It looks like it's Plusnet or nothing if the other options are out of the window. There's no reason they won't do you a deal regardless but you'll need to talk to them first. Just don't mention that you have no other options.

matelodave

How rural is rural, do you have a half decent mobile phone signal from one of the networks- EE, O2, Trhee or Vodafone. If so you could try to see if you can get a better service using 4g. Try a couple of cheap paygo sim cards in your phone and set it up as a hotspot to see what sort of speeds you can get. If it works, then get a 4g router and put a data sim in it.

4g routers are reasonably cheap and can give quite good speeds if you are within a decent service area - we can get 25-35mbit/s with Three where we live out in the Cambridgeshire fens, a bit less with EE and not much with Vodafone or O2. In fact we've had over 60mbits in some places when we take it with us in our caravan.

Its certainly worth a try. Smarty (who use the Three network) have a monthly unlimited data sim for £20 a month