Best WIFI?

[BornInGlasgow]

Who is the best broadband provider for both speed and cost?

It's so expensive :-(

Bump

I think is massively depends on where you live, in my area virgin media is the best coverage (I couldn't tell you the cost though as I have TV with them too so it's all blocked in together) however 10 minutes down the road at my mums house the virgin media signal is awful, I have to be stood practically next to the box to get anything. Also depends what you want to use it for, the more you use the broadband the higher rate you'll probably need. Both my house and my mums have the same broadband deal yet hers is shocking in her house and I can get half way down my road before having to switch to data on my phone.

You can go on the websites, choose help me pick the right one or something similar, put in your usage and they will show you which deal would suit you best. In fact I think if you go on money supermarket or something they will calculate the average speed in your area for you and then show you the best deals for the average speeds you'd get and your projected usage. (no point paying for say 100mbps when your area can only achieve 50mbps)

Ok so the important thing is to know what connections exist to the house and would you be prepared to pay for installation of a new line. Fibre to the house has more bandwidth than copper to the house. How far are you to the exchange point? (The green BT boxes in the street) what are your current upload and download speeds?

You then need to pick the level of service you need. There's no point getting super fast fancy high upload/download speed if you don't have fibre to the house. Unless you have lots of devices and want to stream movies at 4k etc you don't need super duper bandwidth. You won't notice it. 36Mb fibre will suffice a lot of households.

Once you've got what you want to the house you then need to get it to the devices. Depending on your provider depends on the quality of the router they provide. You can buy much better ones in most cases. If you're having issues and need to stand right next to the router to do anything (but once there you can do something) it's the router Wi-Fi not the actual provider causing it.
If you have thick stone walls Wi-Fi signal can struggle to penetrate in which case you'll need more networking infrastructure in your home.

If you have poor upload and download speeds you're either not paying for enough bandwidth, your infrastructure is slowing it down, or your provider is not meeting the contractual guarantees. To test speeds relating to your provider connect via Ethernet directly to the router and use a speed tester. Testing over Wi-Fi may not mean anything to your provider if the contract only commits to Ethernet speed provision.

Do you have satellite/cable tv or a mobile phone contract? Adding broadband to one of those services is sometimes cheaper than a standalone contract? Are you after broadband or fibre?

Not moved in yet. My first little house after over a decade of renting 😊