Confused first time broadband purchaser!

gilesm89 · 19 February 2019 at 10:55AM

This is the first time I’ve had to sort broadband out for myself (after many years doing house shares. Although I spent an evening trying to research the best broadband for me, I’m still finding it very hard to make a decision.

Firstly, the advertised speed; is 10mbs enough for 2 people nowadays? We would like to be able to stream HD movies on the tv and maybe occasionally use for online gaming. Looking at the MSE comparison tool it seems like the next speed up (that is available to me) is much higher at about 35 mbs. Don’t really want to pay the extra money for no perceived benefit.
Note; we usually watch things together so would not often be streaming 2 HD movies at the same time.

Secondly, from reading reviews of the broadband providers it appears that they are almost all terrible but I suppose that comes with the territory of online reviews for a service such as broadband. Which low to mid range providers are actually fine? Talk talk or plus net for example.

Any advice would be really helpful.

onomatopoeia99 · 19 February 2019 at 12:00PM

gilesm89 wrote: »

Which low to mid range providers are actually fine?

Assuming you mean "low to mid PRICE range" then none of them. They're all fine when they work, it's when you need a problem solved you'll see why they're cheap. Most people are happy to go with cheap and nasty then whinge about poor support (e.g. my parents using talktalk), rather then paying more for better service.

10Mbps is fine for on HD stream (not 4k though).

Note that the 10mbps service is almost certainly ADSL which is up to 16mbps, depending on line length and quality, and the 35mbps is FTTC which sis up to 40mbps (about 38 effective) or 80mbps depending on which product, again depending on line length and quality. If you go to the link below it will give you an estimate of what your line will sustain.

https://www.btwholesale.com/includes/adsl/adsl.htm

[Deleted User] · 19 February 2019 at 12:29PM

gilesm89 wrote: »

Note; we usually watch things together so would not often be streaming 2 HD movies at the same time.

'Often' is the word that jumped out at me because if you do go for ADSL (that's the one that averages 11Mbps but up to 18-19 depending on location) it will cause issues.

Given the increasingly small difference nowadays in price I'd go for fibre (usually 35Mbps average but some companies such as Sky have scrapped the lower limit and average 63Mbps).

As for which to avoid then Talktalk do tend to get some slatings on here for CS but if you don't have any problems then they're all the same service pretty much.

pmduk · 19 February 2019 at 1:00PM

I suspect you'll find little to no difference in going for fibre over ADSL these days.

AndyPK · 19 February 2019 at 1:28PM

I would recommend NowTV. They will give you fibre 35Mb for about £25 (similar price to 10Mb)
Reasonable customer serivce and network etc.

THe only downside, is that these companies don't like to downgrade.

WHat you need to do is find out the real speed to your house on the 10Mb package, as it depends on the length of cable from the exchange. If you go part way through an order, it should say your guaranteed download speed is ___Mbps. If this is less than 5 then you probably want fibre

esuhl · 20 February 2019 at 10:05PM

onomatopoeia99 wrote: »

Note that the 10mbps service is almost certainly ADSL which is up to 16mbps...

ADSL2+ (the modern ADSL standard) allows a theoretical maximum of 24Mb/s.

I get around 20Mb/s (just 1.1Mb/s upload speed), but I'm less than 1km from the exchange.

In terms of anecdotal recommendations, I've found most cheap ISPs to be pretty awful. I wouldn't touch Vodafone if you paid me. Seriously.

But I've been quite impressed with Sky. I had an intermittent fault, and although they needed some gentle persuasion to send an engineer, they did so in a reasonable time-frame, and the problem was fixed.

What I really liked about Sky was how professional their call staff were. They listened and understood my technical explanations and helped me troubleshoot intelligently without just reading from a script. And they were very relaxed, friendly, and clearly-spoken. It was actually a pleasure to speak to every one of them.

AndyPK · 20 February 2019 at 11:25PM

Sky are good.

And NowTV is owned by sky

scams2udirect · 21 February 2019 at 2:38AM

choose a cheap fibre connection if you are on a budget it will be a similar price to your 10mbps . youll stream videos nicer in hd

Confused first time broadband purchaser!

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