Broadband for a student in St Andrews

Sabrina

I'm about to move into my house in St Andrews next year and am going doolally trying to find a decent Broadband provider!

I've checked my phone number and my exchange has been enabled for upto 2Mbps broadband. The only problem is finding an ISP!

I will be sharing my connection with one other person and we're not sure how much we both download in a month (in terms of download limits). None of us are heavy gamers or huge downloaders, but we do occasionally, thus speed is not *too* much of an issue.

Our flat is on a 9 month lease so ideally we would only pay for a 9 month broadband connection. Doing some research has shown that it might work out cheaper to pay for 12 months and avoid horrible cancellation fees!

- I initially liked the look of Tiscali, but it sounds really terrible so I think I'm going to avoid it.

- My flatmate's been with Pipex before, but I don't think it's offering a very good deal

- I liked Bulldog's offer since they're knocking a fiver off the monthly prices until the 30th Sept, but I'm also hearing bad things about it

- Has anyone been with v21? It sounds like a great offer paying 9.98 per month and getting free weekend calls

- I've also been looking at the others and am so bamboozled! Nildram? Newnet? Plusnet? Prodigy? Eclipse? Freedom to surf?

Does anyone have any suggestions? Please help!

BobToo

I say Plusnet. Go for the £14.99 service if you don't intend to do much P2P-ing or the £21.99 service if you do. There is a sort of unwritten download limit of 100GB/month, which is well beyond what most people will use.

Nine months isn't going to be enough for any provider to offer free activation or hardware. I think you'd be best to stump up the £58.75 for activation and buy your own hardware. A wireless ADSL router is the most suitable solution if you want to share between two computers and these tend to be pricey from ISPs.

mrJ_5

I recommend zazizam broadband (https://www.zazizam.com/broadband) - they've just cut their unlimited prices for 1mb, and 2mb which is now 21.99, and 31.99 respectedly - or £2 less if you take their phone option also.

i am using their unlimited 512k product for £15.99 a month (with their phone option) - and i have no complaints


i can also suggest that you buy your hardware from a shop, or online - as buying from an ISP directly can be a little more expensive

Sabrina

Thanks so far! We already have the hardware, luckily, so that's one less cost to fork out for us poor students! I'm trying to get a deal that's the magic £14.99 or under, and am hoping that's not being too optimistic!

mrJ_5

the trouble is - trying to get unlimited, cheap, and no long contract is hard to find in one sentence

- priority should be short contract length - that way you can cancel in when you wnat in 9 months time, instead of 12 that most providers have (zazizam have 3) - another thing to look out for is if it claims there is no contract, if you leave within 12 months - you have to pay the activation fee (i belive pipex do this, and plusnet are worse - i read they take £11.75 of the price - for each year you are with them... so it will be about 4 years to leave for nothing *again, so i read*)

anyway, i do recommend zazizam - i have used them for a while now, and have had no problems with them, so i hope this helps