Is cheap broadband ok?

I'm looking to get a broadband connection for a holiday flat. It won't be used for gaming or streaming movies etc. Just need it for getting email and a bit of browsing.

My main home runs BT superfast and is great but the cheapest connection they do is £24.99pm at 10 Mb

However, i've noticed a lot cheaper offers. For example if you look at the broadband price list below, you can see the cheapest is the Post Office at just £15.90 at 11 Mb.

list of broadband prices

So the Post Office connection is slightly faster than BT but £9 pm cheaper!

Am I missing something? Has anybody had experience of using the Post Office broadband?

Appreciate any advice you can give.

Thanks

What's the 4G mobile signal like there? A Three unlimited data/minutes/texts SIM is £11pm for 6 months then £22pm and tethering allowed. Swap your phone contract to it?

Edited by RobertoS (Sat 13-Jul-19 16:38:14)

If the 4G signal is satisfactory, Robertos's suggestion would also future-proof you should the place ever be offered as a holiday let. Looking at the experience in our village, such a let will often be taken over by a family with lots of devices and several people all looking to stream their own content. 10/11Mb download may well not meet their needs.

Have you checked the speed estimate for the property, since the advert figure is just an average and what you will get may be slower or faster

If you are already a BT customer you could have FON or BT WIFI access, if someone else around the area of flat has FON or BT WIFI you can log into it, fine for email or limited browsing. For phones it would have to be a near nabour, for laptop a cheap WIFI antenna (£16) off eBay will pick up a signal from some distance.

@RobertoS - not sure but that is a very good idea thanks. I�ll check next time im there.

Post office has a bad reputation, same for Vodafone and SSE. I would stick to BT, Sky, TalkTalk, PlusNet, EE, Virginmedia.

I have used Sky, BT and TalkTalk, the internet was the same, the only difference was the customer service which I rank as number 1: Sky, Number 2: BT Number 3: TalkTalk.

Post deleted by bobble_bob

its also worth looking at some of the pay as you go deals, so you only pay for the days you use it,
vodafone 'one' may be a good option

I don't know about Vodafone, but agree re your PAYG suggestion. However I also suggested the OP moved his main mobile service to this one, which removes that issue. It's also why I didn't recommend the Three Home MiFi router+SIM, which is something you can take anywhere with you.

I'm still a bit confused by the OP. It appears to be either a holiday flat they own but do not rent out a lot of the time to recover costs, or a commercial rentable holiday flat that doesn't already have broadband. My experience is that most places I rent on holiday have broadband, some of them even having FTTP.

Agreed everywhere I rent has broadband, usually standard fibre 40/10 service. I have not rented anywhere with ADSL in the last 5+ years, it would put be off returning if the speed was below 10 to 20 meg. Even the tiny country rentals in the peak district / north yorkshire moors / lake district have all had 40/10, a couple had 80/20 and one rental had FTTP 330 download with BT which was a real treat.

If it doesn't list wifi on the features, I sort of expect it will have internet anyway, and usually does. I get super disappointed when there's nothing. I had an interesting one once, where they had an AP on the wall, which must have lead to their home broadband in another building (they lived over the field), and the AP brought a landing page to pay... That was annoying! I complained and they gave me their main router password so I spent my browsing in the window with 1 bar on the laptop, and then made the laptop a repeater using the windows 10 functionality. It was acceptable overall.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Tue 16-Jul-19 00:11:12)

If a family is on holiday then maybe going out and about would be more beneficial.

Four users would not need any more than 10mbps for small devices.

I went to Bude in Cornwall last year and they had a TalkTalk service that was fairly slow. The TV in the house had the ability to stream Netflix and we had 4 smartphones and an iPad. The service was barely usable and I spent most of the time on 4G rather than their WiFi. We went out and about every day but still had times in the evening where we wanted to relax after a busy day and not having decent Internet access was a pain.

I don't care about broadband/WiFi when I'm on holiday - I'm much more concerned about poor broadband when I'm at home. Lots of the places I want to holiday just have no good broadband available (just like home), but you can't blame the holiday-let owners for that.

It�ll be down to distance from exchange, not all Talktalk lines perform poorly. I had 80/20 sync and no issues with them in London.

Post deleted by MrSaffron

Yes, wasn't blaming TalkTalk it just happened to be a TalkTalk line - the owners had chosen to go with ADSL rather than VDSL and must have been some way from the exchange.

That's great but others do like to use the Internet when on holiday - for one thing it is great for doing some research about the local area to find good things to do.

Do your research before you go or try an Information Office. Lots of places have leaflets piled high on local attractions. Too reliant on technology.

Good grief! What would happen if we went back a few years and had to talk to each other, play games, etc.

You seem to see it as very black and white - holiday should equal no Internet. You can actually have a good family holiday that is enhanced by the ability to use the Internet at various times. We didn't just all sit around on our phones not talking to each other.

In reply to a post by ian72:

You can actually have a good family holiday that is enhanced by the ability to use the Internet at various times. .

You can, but should we need someone letting out a holiday home to provide it? Or can we just use local places with WiFi or our phones data plan.

End of the day it's a personal choice. And to many not a deal breaker when booking a holiday.

Plenty of places where phones don't have a good enough signal, particularly indoors in stone-built buildings. Also, in small towns and villages the WiFi areas are likely to be only close to pubs, not widespread around a village or small town.

ADSL2+ can be 1-3Mbps in such places. Which tend to be the nicest ones.

We don't need holiday homes to provide broadband. However, it is an option that search sites use for filtering and it is likely that holiday homes that don't have broadband will lose custom and may find in the future that they are unable to keep it a going concern without having broadband. You are obviously happy not to have broadband but if a large number of their customers consider it essential then they may go out of business.

if a large number of their customers consider it essential then they may go out of business

Unfortunately that may be true, but the owners don't always have better broadband available. It is just one more way in which rural areas are being increasingly disadvantaged.

I think by taking custom elsewhere they meant another local holiday let that does provide broadband/WiFi (at whatever rate is available).

If I am looking at a holiday in the Lake District and a place doesn't have any free WiFi, I might look at other companies in that area.
I'm not going to change destination plans completely.

I'm not sure anyone picks their holiday location based on broadband availability so I can't see how rural areas are losing out.

You may wish to check the price after the contract expires on all the deals before you call it cheap:
"Monthly price after 12 months: £30 a month.T&Cs apply."

No issues to choose the cheapest provider, but the most important factor is the quality of technical support and customer service of ISP.

Edited by deleted (Fri 26-Jul-19 10:48:28)

Surely the most important factor outside cost is that the service is good enough that one never needs to find out the quality of technical support or customer service?

True, although periodic contact will most likely need to be made due to Openreach's somewhat decrepit copper network.

In reply to a post by Oliver341:

True, although periodic contact will most likely need to be made due to Openreach's somewhat decrepit copper network.

Depends what you mean by periodic.... once ever 4 or 5 years?

In reply to a post by jchamier:

Depends what you mean by periodic.... once ever 4 or 5 years?

Some copper is more decrepit than others!

Do you mean to say that one shouldn't need to find how is the technical support or customer service, if the service is good?

In my case once in 17 years.

In reply to a post by Gabrel:

Do you mean to say that one shouldn't need to find how is the technical support or customer service, if the service is good?

No. I did not say that, nor did I imply it.