Broadband guide

Best all-in-one phone, TV and broadband deals

Wednesday 8 February, 2011

By Garnet Roach - garnet@consumerchoices.co.uk

Looking for the perfect phone, TV and broadband bundle? Find out everything you need to know to get the best deal at the best price.

Three major broadband providers offers all three services:

• BT broadband (www.BT.com)
• Sky broadband (www.Sky.com)
• Virgin Media (www.Virginmedia.com)

Each has its own strengths and weaknesses, and you should never choose your provider based on cost alone. Think about how you'll use your package - will you be online a lot, make a lot of calls from your landline or spend most of your time watching telly?

Availability

Even before you choose your new provider, you need to find out exactly what’s available in your area. Virgin Media’s TV service and superfast broadband are only available in its cable area - which covers around 51% of the UK.

BT and Sky have wider-reaching networks, but you need at least a 2Mb download speed to use BT Vision and some households might be too far from the local telephone exchange to support digital TV from BT.

Equally, although Sky’s satellite TV service is available to 98% of the UK, broadband customers outside of Sky’s local loop unbundled (LLU) network might have to take its Connect package instead, which only offers speeds of up to 20Mb broadband but costs more each month.

Simply run a broadband bundle postcode search to find out what’s available in your area?

Broadband

Virgin Media’s cable network allows it to deliver very fast, reliable broadband, making it the perfect choice if the internet is an important part of your bundle.

Its network covers around 13 million homes and offers four cable broadband packages at speeds of up to:

• 10Mb broadband
• 30Mb broadband
• 50Mb broadband
• 100Mb broadband

And it also manages to deliver more of its advertised speed according to Ofcom (July 2010). The telecoms regulator found that customers on Virgin Media’s old 20Mb cable package were averaging 15.7Mb - compared to just 6.5Mb from traditional copper wire providers.

Both BT and Sky offer speeds of up to 20Mb broadband on their standard home broadband packages, though BT also offers fibre optic broadband to around four million homes and businesses.

Its BT Infinity packages offer speeds of up to 40Mb broadband, with fast uploads of up to 10Mb. It plans to extend its fibre footprint to two-thirds of the UK by 2015.

Home phone and line rental

Neither BT nor Virgin Media offer the most competitive call rates or line rental on the market, at £14.60 and £13.90 a month respectively.

Sky fares a little better, charging £12.25 a month for line rental, but again, charges are not the most competitive.

The best way to get cheap landline calls is to switch your calls package to a cheaper provider such as Yourcalls.net. However, not all broadband providers allow you to do this, so check before you sign-up.

Digital TV

Virgin Media and Sky are the clear front-runners when it comes to digital TV services. Sky offers more than 50 high-definition (HD) channels, a set-top box you can text when you want it to record something and a new internet TV service called Anytime+.

Virgin Media is set to roll-out its own state-of-the-art TiVo set-top box, and already offers thousands of hours of on-demand TV as well as the BBC iPlayer, ITV and Channel 4 catch-up services direct to your TV.

At the moment, BT can’t really compete with these two suppliers. Its BT Vision service is essentially Freeview with a choice of subscriptions and on-demand TV. But it still uses an aerial, so if you don’t live in an area with good Freeview reception, you still won’t be able to watch these free-to-view channels.

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