Anybody been round this loop recently? Just noticed TalkTalk are charging me £47 a month because I am out of contract. Before I phone them, any good deals around? I'll have a look in the usual places of course but I'm not sure that they are all play with the comparison sites.
This is for fibre to the cabinet. I currently have Faster Fibre with TT which is nominally 38mbps, and I have no problems to speak of with speeds or outages.
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We've found Plusnet to be good. Unlike Talk Talk their call centres are in the UK.
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We out of contract with plusnet, they have been pretty good. We can only get a low speed out here (10mbps) so I just look and see who has a cheap basic speed. Plusnet have been hard to beat been with them for 6 years or so.
Last edited by: sooty123 on Wed 17 Mar 21 at 10:42
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Thanks, I thought Plusnet might be mentioned.
Last edited by: Manatee on Wed 17 Mar 21 at 10:46
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I pay £31 a month for fibre with BT but it will probably go up when out of contract. 34mbps.
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BT full fibre look reasonable for me too, most expensive deal is £30 pm for 2 years.
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... and of course try uSwitch www.uswitch.com/broadband/ who have some very reasonable deals
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I changed from Shell to Plusnet when Shell announced a 12% increase and compulsory change to fibre. I'm still waiting for a refund of the money owing to me from last year, think an email to CEO could be on the cards.
I can't recommend Shell, who seem to be First Utility.
I use MSE to find the current best rate. Got a pre-paid credit card with £60 on it when I joined Plusnet. SWMBO soon spent most of that. I ended up buying something like £5.37 of petrol to try and use the remainder - still got 2P on it!
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>> BT full fibre look reasonable for me too, most expensive deal is £30 pm for
>> 2 years.
>>
I always seem to find a lot of these cheap deals massively depend on where you live. The cheap deals always seem to disappear when I put my postcode in :)
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£44.90 for 2 lines FTTC with Talktalk including next month's £2/month price rise. 34Mbps consistently on the main line, 20Mbps on the second line which 'wakes up' to 30+Mbps when it gets used.
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If you sign up for Quidco they have a comparison area for ISPs with some good looking deals, most with cashback or a bonus payment.
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Thank you for that, I have gone Plusnet.
I didn't speak to TT, I signed in to get my facts straight and their site was so slow I just about gave up. Next bill is £43 although that is including a £5 SIM which I have also terminated so maybe they were charging me £38 for line rental and <38Mb.
The deal with Plusnet is 24.99 monthly for <66Mb, and £65 back on a prepaid Mastercard in 45 days. 18 month contract.
I did find the new contract option in "my account" for TT which was £30 monthly for 2 years. New customer option is similar to Plusnet, but I can't be doing with online servicing that doesn't work properly even if I could bargain it down.
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I have 76Mb fibre broadband with TalkTalk (I've been with it since April 2006) and was paying £26 a month when my contract was about to expire. After a bit of negotiation using the on-line chat service, I got it knocked down to £23 a month.
I could have had FTTP (145Mbs) for £28 monthly for 24 months, but decided there was little point as the speeds I have now are more than sufficient.
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Just had another "don't leave" email from TT offering £20 a month for 38Mbps and 50% off that for 3 months which is actually better than the new customer rate. I could save money by relenting but their online servicing was so bad yesterday that I'll stick with the Plusnet decision.
Plusnet is owned by BT of course. Nice bit of segmentation, Plusnet competes with TT while BT hangs on to a large installed base of customers who pay a higher price, and get a few perks. I'ma cheapskate.
I'll see what's out there in 18m time when we have settled in to the new house and whatever our new entertainment/technology needs are.
All I can remember about Plusnet is that I switched my elderly aunt to them about 10 years ago, and they supplied a very cheap looking ADSL modem router that had an odd brand name on it, Tecnicolor I think. It didn't work very well and I swapped it for something else. Apparently the BT home hubs work with Plusnet so if the free one isn't up to the mark I'll get a BT one from ebay.
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You're likely to get a "Hub One", which, AFAIR is essentially a rebadged and recoloured BT HH5.
(Mine is in the loft, as I use my own hub anyway).
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>> All I can remember about Plusnet is that I switched my elderly aunt to them
>> about 10 years ago, and they supplied a very cheap looking ADSL modem router that
>> had an odd brand name on it, Tecnicolor I think. It didn't work very well
>> and I swapped it for something else. Apparently the BT home hubs work with Plusnet
>> so if the free one isn't up to the mark I'll get a BT one
>> from ebay.
I got a cheap router, possibly the hub one mentioned by T&E. OK as a 'get started' device (we were new to fttc at the time. I quickly retired it; my preference is for Netgear.
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I've been with Plusnet for several years. What exactly are the shortcomings I should have experienced with a Hub One?
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...for your average user, very few, if any. It's an adequate router, but without some of the functionality that a "better" router would provide, and many users probably wouldn't need.
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Thanks for replying, but what functions are you referring to?
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The notable thing from an end-user point of view is the lack of a "Guest Network", something commonly implemented on non-ISP provided routers, and of interest to me because I run a lot of kit on my network, and would prefer to keep it private whilst providing visitors internet access.
At a more technical level (and without being technical) I have, and use, considerably more capability to manage the internal network rather more easily than using the Hub One.
e.g. reserving and allocating "static" IP addresses to the appropriate kit is rather more easy, whilst still allowing DHCP to allocate to those that don't require static.
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Thank you, I think I'll just keep it plugged in.
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I use Guest for the home automation stuff.
The drawback on the Virgin hub which I've run into today is Crankcase mentioned using PiHole to get rid of adverts but it requires you to change the DNS server and you can't do that on a Virgin router (without setting it up as a hub, which would mean buying a new router - sledgehammer/nut). Apparently it's not the only one like that.
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I must admit, I've never tried changing on the on the Plusnet router, but I tend to use either OpenDNS or the Google DNS servers (past experience of other ISPs DNS servers lagging updates quite dramatically). So maybe this is another one.
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>> The drawback on the Virgin hub which I've run into today is Crankcase mentioned using
>> PiHole to get rid of adverts but it requires you to change the DNS server
>> and you can't do that on a Virgin router
Turn off DHCP on the Virgin router. Enter IP address of Pihole on router as new DHCP server. Turn on DHCP on your Pihole. Job jobbed.
Last edited by: Crankcase on Sat 20 Mar 21 at 07:23
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>I run a lot of kit on my network, and would prefer to keep it private whilst providing visitors internet access.
Have you thought about using a Pi ZeroW (~£10) for a guest network?
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....don't need to, my router (which transfers from ISP to ISP, not being "locked") does it natively.
KISS.
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... and the Virgin router also has a native guest network. I don't think I'd have thought of using a Pi for a guest network though.
I have 4 Pi's running different stuff. Two Zeroes are cameras pointing along each side of the garden and taking snaps every 10 minutes so I can eventually knit together a years' time lapse "movie". Done one before of seeds growing. A 3B runs PiHole, gathers my Octopus energy stats (and soon to be my neighbours too), runs my inbound OpenVPN and captures generation data from my solar panels. It also has Plex running but it's network is too slow when I've tried it from abroad. The last one is also a 3B and runs the Home Assistant.
I have a feeling I could probably aggregate them into a new model and use Docker, with an SSD drive as to replace the SD card ( - I've already tried this and it works a treat) but I'm a bit bored with it all for now - maybe next winter/lockdown, whichever comes sooner :-)
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>>It's an adequate router, but without some of the functionality that a "better" router would provide, and many users probably wouldn't need.
If it's a badge engineered BT Home Hub 5, then it should be pretty good on wifi and much better than the free TT one - which has actually been OK for stability and wifi in a central position in our temporary home.
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Fibre broadband, best deals? - Bromptonaut
