11reasons to switch ISP right now
Not satisfied with your broadband provider? Itching to get away? Here are 11 reasons to jump ship
1They keep putting the price up
Yes, we’re looking at you BT. BT has put up the price of its broadband twice in 2018 and five times in the past four years. Of course, it’s far from alone. Other providers routinely increase their prices – often using BT’s own price rises as a smokescreen. Ofcom, meanwhile, will claim competition has never been healthier.
BT’s constant price hikes would be more palatable if it offered the service to match. Our survey places the country’s biggest broadband provider at rock bottom in the table ( see p43).
The good news is that any midcontract price rise gives you a get-outof-jail-free card. You have 30 days from the time they write to you to inform you of the price increase to leave without penalty. You’ll still need to give 30 days’ notice – or 14 days if you’re jumping ship to another provider right away – but you shouldn’t be subject to the price increase in the meantime.
The tricky part is that broadband is rarely bought in isolation these days. BT, for example, offers a £5-permonth discount to mobile phone customers if they’re BT Broadband subscribers. You can leave the broadband, but if you’ve still got the best part of two years to run on your mobile contract, you could be penalised by more than £100 for doing so.
In such instances, your best bet might be a friendly chat with the retention department…
2 You can get a cheaper fixed-price deal
If you’re sick of providers implementing mid-term price increases, knowing they’ve probably got you by the cajones anyway, then opt for a fixed-term plan that specifically rules them out. Recommended award winner Plusnet recently followed TalkTalk’s lead by offering a fixed-price contract for 18 months. At the time of writing, Plusnet’s Unlimited Fibre Extra broadband plan, for example, offers an 80Mbits/sec down, 20Mbits/ sec up fibre-to-the-cabinet service (with average download speed of 66Mbits/sec) for £29 per month.
Sadly, those prices are only offered to new customers. Existing customers must check the customer portal to find out what bones they’re being thrown.
The good news for existing customers? Plusnet promises a personal account review when your contract nears expiry, so you don’t get thrust into an expensive standard tariff without warning.
3 There are faster speeds available (in some areas)
You might be looking at your speed test results and feeling pretty pleased with yourself, with 75Mbits/sec bursting through your router. For many people, that is indeed living the dream.
However, it’s by no means the ceiling these days. Gigabit speeds are now within the reach of some people – although not yet from the mainstream providers.
Thinkbroadband runs highly detailed monthly speed tests, which show that it’s customers of the lesser-known, regionalised providers that are getting the fastest speeds in Britain today.
The top 10% of customers on Hyperoptic’s gigabit fibre connections, for example, see speeds of 621Mbits/sec down and 576Mbits/ sec up. Community Fibre’s top 10% are getting 486Mbits/sec down and a staggering 824Mbits/sec up.
When it comes to the mainstream providers, the fastest connection available is from Virgin Media. The top 10% of customers on Virgin’s Vivid 350 plan are seeing 357Mbits/sec down but only 22Mbits/sec up – almost 40 times slower than Community Fibre’s upload speeds and a symptom of the DOCSIS technology deployed by Virgin.
4 You don’t need that TV bundle any more
One of the big reasons people stick with their broadband provider is that they get it as part of a package. This is particularly the case for Sky and Virgin customers. But do you really need that TV bundle in the Netflix age?
Virgin recently upset customers when it failed to reach a deal with UKTV, resulting in ten channels – including Dave and Gold – being dropped from the service. Did the price drop? Heck no.
Sky still has the carrot of Premier League football and other premium channels to handcuff customers, but all of Sky’s output can be streamed via other services. Sky’s own Now TV offers all the sports channels, Sky Atlantic and access to its movie archive – without contract and often at prices far cheaper than a Sky satellite package. You can stream the service from any broadband provider and a multitude of devices.
In other words, the TV bundle isn’t the ball and chain it once was.
It’s customers of the lesser-known, regionalised providers that are getting the fastest speeds in Britain today
A recent Ofcom report found the number of UK subscriptions to television streaming services such as Netflix had overtaken those to traditional pay television for the first time. The days of being a social pariah because you haven’t got satellite or cable are long gone.
5 You’re bored of bad bundled routers
To be fair, the standard of routers supplied by the big boys has improved markedly over the years. Most aren’t the “throw it straight in the cupboard under the stairs” piece of landfill they were five or ten years ago. That said, they’re still not great.
AVM’s FritzBox routers have, on the other hand, always been well received by the PC Pro’s Reviews team, both for their turn of speed and their breadth of features. AVM also won a recommended award in the Best Router category of our own awards last year, but didn’t have enough respondents to make the cut in this year’s gongs.
Zen Internet – our overall broadband winner since time began – supplies FritzBox routers with many of its tariffs. Bundled equipment doesn’t have to be bad.
6 You’re less likely to get fake support calls
Customers of the big broadband providers are probably well used to the “I’m calling from your broadband support team” drill – about six times a week. TalkTalk customers are particularly prone to this menace. Two years ago, three employees who worked for TalkTalk’s Indian call-centre contractor were arrested on suspicion of selling TalkTalk customer data.
According to a BBC report, this data was “obtained by a criminal gang, with USB sticks full of data trading hands at parties”.
It was subsequently used to target TalkTalk customers with fake “we’ve detected a virus on your computer” scams.
TalkTalk has always insisted this was an industry-wide problem, not confined to one provider.
There may be truth in that, but what can be said with some degree of certainty is that customers of smaller providers such as Zen are much less likely to be targeted by such nonsense, because their call centres are run in-house in the UK and they’re a less obvious target for data theft. And while we don’t think it’s likely
PC Pro readers would fall for such scams, the irritation of answering the phone calls is a pest in itself.
7 It’s not that painful to switch
If it’s been a few years since you switched broadband provider, the process isn’t as dreadful as it was in the past.
If you’re moving from one Openreach provider to another, and you’re at the end or nearing the end of a contract, it’s straightforward. Simply sign up with your new provider and it should handle the entire process. The old provider may contact you to confirm you want to switch – and no doubt try to persuade you to stay – but the whole thing should take less than a fortnight and there should be no or minimal downtime.
Things get trickier if you’re switching technology, such as moving from ADSL to fibre, or even from fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) to fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP). Or from Virgin’s cable to Openreach or vice versa. That kind of switch normally requires an engineer visit, and then you enter the lap of the Appointment Gods.
That said, there are signs of improvement on that front, too. In “early 2019” (Ofcom doesn’t like to be specific), an automatic compensation scheme will come into force that will pay out £25 for a missed appointment and £5 for every day a new service is delayed.
No, it’s not quite “pack your bags, love, we’re off to the Bahamas” money, but it might be sufficient when multiplied across a huge customer base for BT, Sky and co to get their act together.
8 There’s a new provider in your area
The days of the great broadband landgrab are over. Local loop unbundling has come to an end and there aren’t a great deal of companies laying new fibre networks, outside of BT. That said, there are pockets of growth.
Regional and community-focused FTTP projects are continuing to thrive. Virgin is still stretching the tentacles of its fibre network, particularly in big cities. And other providers are experimenting with small-scale fibre networks.
How do you know what’s available in your region? The SamKnows Broadband checker ( pcpro.
link/289sam) is a great place to start. Pop your phone number and postcode into the relevant boxes and it will summarise all the services that reach your doorstep, with the ability to break down results to FTTP, FTTC and cable providers, if necessary. It also shows any wireless providers in your region, if you’re still waiting for the trenches to be dug in your street.
9 You can still keep your email address
One reason people are reluctant to move broadband providers is they’ve had the same ISP-specific email address for years and don’t want to go through the rigmarole of updating all their web accounts, friends and associates with a new address. It’s a legitimate concern, but one that can be worked around – albeit sometimes at a cost. BT Premium email, for example, allows former BT customers to retain their BT Broadband email address even after they’ve jumped ship. The sting in the tail is this costs £7.50 per month, recently
If it’s been a few years since you switched broadband provider, the process isn’t as dreadful as it was in the past
hiked from £5 per month. That’s a frankly outrageous fee for a basic email service, but if you’re desperate to cling to your BT address and equally desperate to leave BT, it’s an option. Even if it’s only for a migratory month or two, to buy yourself some time to switch over all your accounts and inform your contacts.
Others are less stingy. Sky basically gives you an email address for life. I recently reactivated my Sky email address despite changing ISP more than five years ago! TalkTalk gives you a year’s grace on its email, while Virgin will let you keep using your email for 90 days after you leave.
We’d strongly recommend you either stick to webmail (Gmail, Outlook.com and so on) or register your own domain for email, so that you’re not held captive by broadband providers.
10 You don’t need the landline phone
Most landline phones get about as much use these days as Bill Cosby’s agent. Alas, line rental remains a must-have for most providers, racking up the cost for a service that you might only half-use.
There are providers who will offer broadband only. Virgin Media doesn’t insist you take a landline, although if you think that’s going to knock the best part of £20 off your bill, think again. The tariffs are around a fiver or so cheaper than comparable speeds including line rental from other providers. Still, that adds up over the course of a year.
Other regional fibre providers such as Relish (London and Wiltshire) are also happy to connect you without a landline phone.
11 Upload speeds are important to you
The broadband industry is obsessed with download speeds. Upload speeds nary warrant a mention in the ads, but they’re just as important – if not more important – for some people. If you’re a photographer sending gigabytes of photos to clients from home, you don’t want them dribbling up the pipe at 5Mbits/sec or 10Mbits/sec.
As we mentioned earlier, Virgin’s network technology isn’t geared for uploads and ADSL can be painfully slow on the uplink, especially if you’re at the end of an exchange’s reach. Other technologies give more weight to the uploads.
The new G.Fast services being rolled out by BT – basically FTTC on steroids – are delivering very decent upload speeds, for instance.
The top 10% of customers on G.Fast lines measured by Think Broadband in July received an average upload speed of 46.8Mbits/sec (and downloads of 198Mbits/sec) since you asked. It’s by no means FTTP-grade, but its more than twice as fast as Virgin’s fastest lines.