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?