New research carried out by Virgin Media shows that many people in the UK may be struggeling to get to grips with a lot of broadband terminology. Some of the results may be a little bit shocking, other parts may be unsurprising. Virgin Media are planning on helping those of us who aren’t up to speed by introducing some “Broadband Schools” to help people get to grips with broadband.
The research carried out showed that…
83% - Weren’t aware that the distance between the modem and the wall socket connection can affect broadband speed
73% - Didn’t know how to see what connection speed they were getting
51% - Didn’t know what broadband speed they should be getting
45% - Didn’t know what a ‘Dongle’ was (something for mobile broadband).
40% - Didn’t know was ADSL was
40% - Didn’t have a clue what an internet browser (this one I am a little surprised about - maybe people just aren’t aware or interested in the technical names for things)
40% - Wouldn’t download files off the web as they are not sure about the legality of it
40% - Didn’t like their current broadband connection speed
33% - Didn’t shop online due to security concerns
30% - Didn’t know how to check a website you’re accessing or submitting personal details over is secure
27% - didn’t know what a URL was (a web address)
18% - Didn’t know what IPTV is (Internet Television service) - In all honesty, I did have to check
17% - Have used the social networking website, Twitter
16% - Believed ADSL is always quicker than Fibre Optic broadband
14% - Thought that tangled wires would slow your broadband speed down
14% - Weren’t aware of the unit that broadband speeds are measured in
13% - Didn’t know what a blog was (an online diary)
12% - Weren’t aware that a mailbox is where your emails get delivered to
7% - Believed Blue-Ray was a form of broadband
Never mind folks! It’s nothing to be embarrassed about - but definitively something you might want to improve. Virgin Media’s new broadband schools will hopefully be useful and coming to an area near you soon. I’ll update you again when I know more about these broadband schools.
The broadband schools will be introduced in areas which did poorly in Virgin Media’s research. The main areas were Birmingham, Belfast, Leeds, London, Wolverhampton, Plymouth, Gloucester, Chelmsford, Cambridgeand Newcastle. If you live in one of these parts it is more likely that a Virgin Media broadband school will open up near you.
BT are currently offering an online only offer for their business broadband. The plan costs £12.50 for the introductory period, then rises.
For this you will get a connection speed of up to 8Mb and 10GB monthly usage. You can purchase a router with it, but at £59 ex VAT you might be able to get a more affordable one elsewhere. This plan also comes with 50 Wi-Fi minutes per month which could be useful for smaller businesses or small start up companies.
New BT Broadband customers can get a nice £30 off your phone bill when you sign up to BT’s broadband packages. They are offering this on their Unlimited Option 3 and anywhere plan. Both of these plans come with unlimited usage and up to 8mb download speeds.
With Bt’s Fast & reliable Option 1 plan you will only get £10 off.
Along with getting money off your phone bill, if you are willing to sign up to an 18 month contract, over a 12 month one you will be able to get the first 3 months at a reduced rate!
This month many of the big mobile broadband companies have some nice special offers for customers! It’s important to remember that one of the most important things to remember when buying mobile broadband is the coverage. Before you sign up to any mobile broadband package make sure that you can receive mobile broadband in your area, and the places you plan on using it. There’s no point getting the best offer if it turns out you can’t use your connection anywhere. I’ll start off by talking about Orange.
Orange’s Mobile Broadband Offers:
You’ve got until the end of the month to take advantage of this offer from Orange. They are offering either a free dongle or a lowered price dongle with all of their mobile broadband plans. The dongle the the USB stick you plug into your computer to be able to recieve the mobile broadband and they can be quite costly. Orange originally charged £48.50 for the dongle so getting it for free, or at the reduced rate of £29 is a massive incentive to sign up, if you were already thinking about it. Unlike with some providers, Orange have a range of colorus you can choose from, which are white, black and pink. Though, maybe some what suprisingly they don’t supply an orange one.
Not only are they running this special offer on the dongles, but they are also discounting the monthly rate of their plans on a 30 day only contract. The plans with the reduced rate are as follows:
3 gb monthly usage
30 day contract
£14.68 per month
£29.00 for dongle
10 gb monthly usage
30 day contract
£24.47 per month
£29.00 for dongle
Finally, they also have an online only offer. This gives you the following:
1 gb monthly usage
18 month contract
£9.79 per month
FREE DONGLE!
If you compare their special offers with what similar companies provide they do work out a little bit cheaper, but their special offers might not be as special as they could be!
Three’s Mobile Broadband Offers
For price, Three have been one of my favorite providers for some time now. If you’re already in a 3 contract then you can get an additional 25% off three’s products, you just need to enter your 3 mobile number and account number when at the checkout.
Free iPod Shuffle
If you sign up to three’s 5 gb or 15 gb 18 month plan then you will be given a free iPod shuffle as well as a free modem stick!
Free Modem Stick
Three offer a free modem stick with all of their pay month plans, except their smallest plan which is a 1 gb plan on a 12 month contract. With this plan you would have to pay £48.93 for the modem stick. If you were looking at this plan I’d recommend thinking about Orange’s 1 GB online offer that I mentioned above.
Three’s Other Deals
Though, not entirely relevant to broadband, if you after a new mobile phone contract for around £30 a month and would like a free Nintendo Wii, maybe you should check this offer out.
Vodafone’s Mobile Broadband Offers
Vodaphone don’t really have that many special offers this month, but it is worth noting that a few of their plans have a discounted rate for the first 3 months and they offer a free modem stick/dongle with many of their plans.
O2’s Mobile Broadband Offers
O2 have a range of mobile broadband packages avaliable. One of their main offers is to supply all mobile broadband customers with a free mobile phone.
Free Modem Stick
O2 are offering a free modem stick with their 24 month and 18 month pay monthly contracts. This is a saving of £58.71.
Cheaper Home Broadband
Another advantage of going with O2 for your broadband is that you get a discounted rate on their home broadband, on top of the discount you would get for being an O2 customer. This is a pretty nice deal if you need home and mobile broadband.
T-Mobile’s Mobile Broadband Offers
T-Mobile which was rated as the Best Network by The Mobile Data Association in August 2008 and the fastest Mobile Broadband Network by PC Pro (Aug 2008) and best value by a YouGov “Dongle Tracker” survey.
Free Modem Stick
T-Mobile doesn’t really have any special offers this month. They are offering a free modem stick with most of their plans though.
Virgin Media’s Mobile Broadband Offers
Virgin have only one mobile broadband offering which is a 3 gb monthly usage for £15 on an 18 month contract.
Free Modem Stick
A pretty standard offering from Virgin, giving away a free modem stick
Discounted Home Broadband
In a similar way to O2, Virgin Media also offer a discounted rate on their mobile broadband if you take it out with their L or XL broadband package.
Customers of Tiscali who use the screaming.net email address have had an email free bank holiday weekend as there were issues with the registration details of the domain. It appears that Tiscali, which bought out old ISP screaming.net, might not have renewed the domain name in time. Users of the screaming.net email address have had previous issues of a similar nature.
A member of the Tiscali Forums emailed Network Solutions which is the company that Tiscali use to register their domains through and they said:
Regarding your concern, multiple expiration notices were sent to you by Network Solutions prior to, and after the domain name registration expired. When we did not receive your renewal fee by the expiration date, your domain name registration services were deactivated. However, rather than delete the domain name at that point, we sent additional renewal notices and provided a grace period of more than 30 days. Because we did not receive your renewal fees by the end of the grace period, your domain name services were terminated in accordance with our Service Agreement and the domain name was registered by another registrant.
A look at the Whois information of the domain shows that the domain’s administrative status is “Pending Renewal or Deletion”.
It appears those who use @screaming.net might need to start looking for a new, more reliable email address!
Most times you turn the radio or TV on you hear about amazingly cheap broadband offers…you do need to be careful to read the small print though! They might not be as good value as your initially think.
First 3 months for only…
The most common thing ISPs do to make a price look better than it is, is to offer a reduced rate for the first 3 or so months. After that period prices will go up.
It’s a good idea to work out the 12 month cost of it, rather than just assume that it’ll be the cheapest just because the first few months are discounted.
0847 & premium rate support numbers
Some budget broadband suppliers may not be as cheap as they seem when you’ve had to phone for some help. For instance, Orange Broadband charge up to 50p a minute and many others charge 4-8p a minute. Over the course of a support phone call, having waited in line and pushed a lot of buttons it adds up.
You may be able to get around some of these charges with the help of SAYNOTO08700.com.
Download Limits and Acceptable usage policies
ISPs have to save money with cheaper plans and an easy way of doing that is to limit how much data you can download. They may put in stop guards, so that when you’ve used your data amount you cannot access anything else. However, it is common for them not to cut you off and charge you extra for the additional usage (usually at a much higher rate than if you paid for it before hand).
Switching to these cheaper plans
So, you’ve worked out that if you change from your current ISP to another you can save yourself some money. Are you sure? If you’ve not finished your contract then your current ISP may charge you a leaving fee and for any hardware they have supplied (eg, that “free” wireless router). Be careful not to leave soon and end up paying more because of it.
Set up fees
Set up fees can be the biggest killer of cheap broadband. For instance, Sky’s cheapest plan charges £60 for set up which kind of ruins any possible savings.
So, what to do..
Just make sure you read all the small print, and everything at the bottom of your page surrounding the package. Take into other related costs, such as support fees and the hardware costs. It’s always a good idea to work out the price of all of it being set up and what you will pay for one year. Then compare that amount with all the providers you are planning on using to find out which one is really cheaper.
Virgin Media have just released Vstuff. It comes free with every broadband package and it gives Virgin Media’s broadband users three fantastic additional services.
1 - Being able to back up files to Virgin Media’s servers
The first bonus with the Vstuff package is that you get a certain amount of disk space which you can back up important files too. This means that those holiday snaps that can’t be replaced, that music collection that took days to get onto the computer, important emails or files can all be backed up free of charge. With Vstuff you can also set it up so backups automatically happen - which is a great thing as manually doing backups can become a little bit tedious.
2 - Storage space which is accessable anywhere
Along with being able to use this space to back up your files, you can also use it as storage space. This means that you can access your files from any computer. This is great for those who maybe take some work home, or want to access some files at home from work. It could be an easy way to transfer music files from your old to new computer and many other similar applications.
3 - Free Photo Prints
This is one of my favorite features with this scheme! One of the biggest problems with going completely digital when it comes to cameras is, you no longer get the hard copy. In my mind it is nice to be able to hand over some professionally printed photos of your holidays, or of a wedding - especially for relatives who don’t have computer access. Depending on what broadband plan you are on determines how many of these free prints you get. For the first 3 times you use it, you’ll get free postage too!
So, what do I get with my plan?
Depending on which broadband plan you are on changes what you get, here’s a list for you to look at.
Virgin Broadband (Cable)
Size: M/L
Backup/Storage space: 5GB
Free Photo Prints: 25 per month
Size: XL.
Backup/Storage space: 10GB
Free Photo Prints: 50 per month
Size: XXL
Backup/Storage space: Unlimited (subject to an acceptable use policy)
Free Photo Prints: 100 per month
National Broadband
Bundle 2 & 3 / Plan 1 & 2
Backup/Storage space: 5GB
Free Photo Prints: 25 per month
Bundle 1
Backup/Storage space: 10GB
Free Photo Prints: 50 per month
Want more?
If the plan you’re currently on does not entitle you to unlimited storage, or as many photo prints as you would like, for £5 a month extra you can upgrade to having unlimited storage/backup space, alnog with 100 photo prints a month.
Is there anything else I should know?
I suppose the only other thing to mention is that Mac users will have to wait a little bit before they can use this service for backups or the storage space. Virgin Media do say that this will be a future developement, so hopefully it won’t take too long. The free prints offer only seems to be running for the first 12 months and you cannot carry over photos to the next month if you don’t use them. For other information you can also visit the Virgin media Vstuff website.
If you’re after fast speed broadband then Be specialises in this very well. The Be pro package offers 24Mb a month download speeds (and a 2.5MB upstream connection) with unlimited usage. This plan costs £21.50 if you’re willing to be on a 12 month contract. If you use the discount code, 3MONTHSFREE when purchasing you’ll be able to get the first 3 months for free. If you don’t wish to be on a 12 month contract, you can pay slightly more at £24 a month (and there is a £24 connection fee). You are still required to give 3 months notice.
https://www.bethere.co.uk/homebroadband.do
O2’s Pro plan or their Premium plan offer a download speed of up to 20MB. If you’re already an O2 customer prices start at £9.79 a month with no connection charge, otherwise it is £14.68 a month.
http://broadband.o2.co.uk/
If neither of these packages offers enough speed for you, then maybe you should check out Virgin Media’s XXL plan. This costs a fair amount at £50 a month – however, it does get speeds of up to 50MB! That means you can download a music track in about a second. If that sounds like over kill you could always use their 20MB XL plan which costs £30 a month.
With Virgin Media if you take out a phone line with them you are also able to reduce the broadband cost by around £10 to £20 a month.
http://allyours.virginmedia.com/websales/service.do?id=2
Mobile broadband is fantastic for those of us who take our laptops around with us, and don’t want to worry about getting access to an Internet connection. You can generally expect to get speeds of around 3.6MB and around 99% of the UK is covered. This makes it great for businesses and also for students.
For instance, if you’re a university student and you’re looking around for a house for next year you’ll no doubt want broadband. Though you’ll be able to get a reasonable deal, you’ll probably be forced into a 12 month contract. This means you’ll pay for the broadband, even when you’re at home, not using it. Though you will still have to pay for mobile broadband each month, you’ll be able to continue using it when you get home or even if you’re revising at a local park.
The cheapest mobile broadband per month, currently available is from Orange. You can get their 1GB plan for £9.79 a month, with a £29 set up fee on an 18 month contract. However, with their high set up fee, you’d be better off going with three. It costs a little bit more at £10 a month, however it doesn’t include a set up fee, which reduces the first year cost by just over £26.
http://shop.orange.co.uk/shop/mobile-broadband
Vodafone offer the fastest mobile broadband, with speeds of up to 7.2MB. On a 12 month contract you can get a 3GB limit for £15 a month.
http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-broadband-price-plans/usb-stick
As has been the case over the past few months, some of the best deals available are to be had by bundling your services with providers you currently use, or could move over to. For instance if you use a mobile phone, or sky TV, you may find that by purchasing broadband through one of your current suppliers could save you money!
The best deals around are probably to be had for O2 customers. If you use one of their services you get a discounted broadband rate. There ’standard’ plan costs just £7.34 a month. With their standard plan you do not pay a connection charge (which generally takes away the sweetness of deals elsewhere), you also get a free wireless router, free UK customer support, McAfee security software and 100 free web texts each month. For the money you get speeds of up to 8MB and you get unlimited downloads! Over the course of a year this deal would only cost you £88.08, which is a saving of just under £60 for being an O2 customer.
If you’re prepared to pay just 3 pence a year more, you could upgrade to their premium package. For a short time only, you will get the first 3 months free (so the entire year costs just £88.11, compared to £88.08 on the standard package). This means you get speeds of up to 20MB. You’ll get the same features as the previous package along with a higher amount of free web texts and more McAfee security licences.
http://broadband.o2.co.uk/home/index.jsp
If you don’t use O2, or are not able to switch over to them, but happen to be a Sky TV subscriber you’re still in luck! If you also use Sky’s telephone service, Sky Talk, you are entitled to a free broadband connection with speeds of up to 2MB. If you don’t use Sky Talk you can pay £5 a month for this service – which is a bargain! Admittedly this won’t be great for massive downloads, but should work fine for general web browsing and maybe even a little bit of video streaming (such as through iPlayer or 4OD). You’re limited to 2GB of data transfer so you won’t be able to go mad downloading lots of big files or watching a lot of streamed TV, but you’ve still got more than enough there to cover browsing the Internet and checking your emails every day.
I find people generally over estimate their Internet usage, for instance, with a 2GB plan you should be able to send 1300 plain text emails, spend 60 hours surfing the web, watch 60 two minutes videos and download around 120 music tracks.
Sky’s base plan includes a wireless router but you will be charged a £60 connection fee which could be a massive put off if you don’t intend to carry on with the service for more than a year. If you use their mid or max plan the connection fee drops to £30 or £0.
http://broadband.sky.com/
If you don’t want to bundle your services you should expect to pay a little bit more. AOL offers a ‘just broadband’ offer for the fair price of £14.99. The first 3 months are charged at a reduced rate of £4.99. If you’re going to carry on looking around a package in the price range is probably about the lowest you should expect to pay if you do not bundle services.
http://www.aolbroadband.co.uk/