r/UKBroadband

hey there, not sure how active this subreddit is, and i'm sorry in advance if any of my questions sound stupid. i'm 20 and have never had to worry about the internet before nor have i had the money (before now) to even consider just changing our internet

my family is currently on sky broadband paying £75 (roughly) monthly, and it feels like it just keeps on rising in cost. is this normal??? i don't know what our connection speed is, but i can just say it's awful and sky has been awful throughout my life

i've been looking into wifi contracts and whatnot, and it seems to be normal for there to be a price increase every year, but is £75 normal?? we have landline, tv, and wifi - to clarify

i want to switch providers and i don't understand why the price is so cheap compared to what my parents are paying right now, why are/have they been paying so much?? is it normal to pay this much just to have terrible connection?

my actual questions:

1. should i give sky another chance since my parents have been loyal to them for over a decade?

2. if yes, what do i say/do to sky to get the price reduced by over half (£75 is ridiculous and we cannot afford this, and i'm not sure how my parents have been paying this much for so long)

3. how do i actually get good internet? lol i just don't understand how to compare contracts

4. if i switch providers, can i "reset" my contract to reset the price instead of having the yearly increase? can i do this with sky??

thanks in advance. im so confused looking into all these contracts online :(

Looking for suggestions to get me internet for the next 2 weeks.

We’re new to the UK, and just moved in to a relatively new house near Oxford. I have signed up with Zen / Openreach for 1.6Gb service. However, they can’t activate it without an engineer visit (I believe they need to replace the ONT), which is not going to happen for 2 more weeks.

In the meantime, I’m using a TPLink 4G with a Scancom “Unlimited” Vodafone SIM, which I’m finding out is capped at 600GB. It’s myself and my wife and our two adult children, and at our old place, we used ~400-500GB/Week. We’ve been taking it easy and limiting streaming (And the 4G coverage has been somewhat intermittent with lots of dropping, so the streaming we have been doing kind of sucked), but are still at 350GB after the first week, so need to find a better option before we get cut off.

Our phones are through 1p/EE, and work OK outside, but can’t reliably hold on to a phone call. I picked the Vodafone sim based on the Ofcom coverage map, which shows Vodafone and O2 as good options for our current location, with EE being variable indoor and 3 being variable outdoors.

Is my best option just to get a second SIM, and activate it once I hit the limit on the first? Are there any better options?

Thanks

Before I phone BT and Talk Talk to try to untangle my mother's broadband and phone service as we get closer to the end of copper landlines, does anyone here have advice on the most likely way to avoid losing a longstanding landline number and not confusing customer service reps with something that might be complicated?

There is both a BT line with payment for line rental going to BT each month and a Talk Talk (ex-Pipex) ADSL service. My best guess is that at some point perhaps twenty years ago Pipex/Tiscali/TalkTalk called to offer a calls bundle but this was, presumably, not a Local Loop Unbundling as the BT account has continued.

Is there any risk to phoning Talk Talk and just asking them to stop the Broadband and calls over-the-top service, then contacting BT to add broadband to the existing phone service/replace that with FTTP and a VoIP phone service? Or could BT carry out a one-touch switch from Talk Talk to their own service and keep the phone number? It might be very straightforward, but I'm concerned some set up from long ago might not be reflected in the current processes or well understood by customer service.

I've been slammed by an unknown third party, who initiated a switch on my broadband service. My service provider is Vodafone. Someone initiated a broadband switch twice for my address, once last week and the second time two days ago. The first attempt was given with a week's lead time, so I was able to get the switch cancelled. The second attempt gave 7 HOURS of lead time, which was too close for Vodafone to do anything.

I'm trying to collect some information about One Touch Switch processes to better find someone/some organisation who can help me investigate. Would really appreciate anyone in the industry better informed than Vodafone's customer service reps. (Vodafone will be reconnecting my service in two weeks, so I'm more interested in finding the root cause to prevent future attempts rather than how to get Internet back).

• How was this possible with One Touch Switch? Isn't there some bare minimum information verification between the gaining and losing providers? What information did this third party have to initiate this?
• What specific circumstances makes a switch possible in < 24 hours??? Is it not usually at least a week or two?
• Are there hypothetical scenarios that could have led to this happening other than someone daft putting in their address incorrectly?

Has anyone had any experience of the One Touch Transfer when moving ISP's?

If my new ISP cannot complete the order, or install the new fibre connection, will my connection and service with my current ISP continue as normal? I don't want to lose the current internet service if there are my issues with the new one.

TIA

I was helping a relative look for a cheaper deal and it’s insane how deep you have to dig to find the Social Tariff options. They’re offering 50Mbps for like £12-£15, but they make you jump through so many hoops to actually sign up, it's like they don't want people to find them. Does anyone know which provider actually has the best 'no-hassle' setup for this, or are they all equally difficult to deal with?

Its that time again, to renew my contract. Two years ago when I renewed, Virgin Media had just built their fibre product in the area but due to the persistence and dishonesty of their sales people I refused to switch to them. I was hearing noises about Openreach being available "within the next year" so I let my current provider, PlusNet, renew my contract for two years with the proviso that when Openreach completed their fiber network I would be automatically switched over to fiber. Well two years have come and gone and no Openreach network. Their was a flurry of Openreach engineer activity in the automn of 2025 and I ask one of the engineers when full fibre will be available and he though in the spring of 2026, yet here we are and no further activity and nothing heard from Openreach. Their checker is still stating "building within the next year".

So I have the same dilemma as I had two years ago - go with virgin media or stay with PlusNet on the FTTC "fibre" product. I spoke with Ofcom who could not give me any further information. They did point out that I was already on FTTC so not a priority, which was being given to copper customers. I was then given the usual advice to speak with my provider - who could only tell me as much as the Openreach checker was telling me. I got a distinct "not our problem" vibe.

I guess I can understand the reason for priorities, but it misses the point: do I lock myself into an inferior FTTC product for another two years or run with a company that has given me good reason not to trust them. A dire choice and that's before I even look at reviews.

Why is there no one I can talk to to get a more definite timeline?

I've been with VM for some time - I think 2nd term of 18-month contracts. At the time I took out the initial contract, no one else locally could touch their *upload* speeds. Now most others seem to match or be close to their 100Mb/s.

Download speed is important, but I do a lot of video work at home, and quickly uploading the finished product is more important to me. I've got used to a workflow that involves kicking off an upload, going to bed, and most times it completes whilst I am asleep.

Occasionally, though, I'd like to upload a video during the day - in the background whilst I'm doing some editing.

The fastest package I've seen locally is 115Mb/s. I have a friend in the centre of Edinburgh who has 1 GB up and 1 GB down. If I have 1 GB down, can't I get 1 GB up too? :)

Is Virgin's 100Mb/s a technical throttle?

My provider just forced the move to Digital Voice and now I’ve got my base station sat right next to the router in the hallway because that’s the only place it plugs in. I used to have the phone in the kitchen but I really don't want a 10-meter cable trailing along the skirting board. Are those little "digital adapters" actually reliable or is it just easier to switch to a DECT cordless setup?

I'm in the middle of a Plusnet install. When it's finished can I change the ssid and password to match my old Virgin settings so that I don't have to reconnect my fire stick, cameras, relays etc to the new ssid?

Is there any reason this wouldn't work?

Hi, we have just moved into a new house in Northern Ireland and have gone to get connected to full fibre (which we thought would be easy as there is a fibre line running over our front lawn with a pole on the grass).

We have been told that Fibrus are the only people who we can use as they won the contract for our area. So when we contact them they say that there is no availability as the 1:8 splitter two poles away is fully utilised and they would need to run another fibre line from two towns over so it was not possible. However, we bumped into an engineer who was fixing the pole down the road the other day and he said the call centre was wrong and that we could definitely get full fibre.

That leaves our only option as Starlink, which I am not adverse to using, but I wanted a second option before giving up and paying the extra.

Any help would be appreciated.

Hello, I’ve been having a sort out and dug out my Plusnet Hub1 and Plusnet Hub2 routers which got sent to me from Plusnet. Never been used because I’ve always used my own equipment. Going to donate them to a Charity Shop… do you think they could work on other ISPs networks… I’m also not sure if they are pre configured to me and if they can be changed… if anyone wants them and can cover postage you can take them off me.