Broadband Bundles

How to Choose a Broadband Bundle

THE Internet, a home phone and digital television are three things that most of us live side by side with and also pay through the nose for!

You can, however, put an end to this by ‘bundling’ these products together to get a discounted rate and the benefit of dealing with a single service provider.

Broadband bundles are good for:

Mixing and matching
There are plenty of different broadband bundles to suit just about everybody's tastes, whether you're a chatterbox, a serial texter or a square-eyed TV fan.

Currently, one of the most comprehensive broadband bundle packages is Virgin Media's 4 for £40 package, which offers: Broadband, digital TV, landline and a mobile phone. They are currently the only broadband bundle provider that enables you to mix in a mobile phone and TV into the deal (Orange Broadband also offer a mobile phone option, but no television or homephone), but if you aren’t concerned about getting a mobile phone, there are around 50 broadband providers that offer broadband packages with a huge variety in broadband speed, phone packages and digital options.

What you can get depends on how much you are prepared to spend.

Heavy use of all the products
The only way you will truly benefit from a broadband bundle is by using each part of the package to its potential.

For example, Virgin Media's top broadband package offers a whopping 20MB broadband, which would be far beyond the need and capabilities of all but the heaviest broadband users, in which case it may be better to substitute lower broadband speeds for a better digital TV, or phone package.

Broadband bundles are unsuitable for:

Moving house?
If you live in rented accommodation, or plan on moving house in the near future, check out the contract terms to see what happens if and when you move elsewhere. Most providers will specify a contract of at least a year and many are 18 months.

With ADSL broadband, moving home is not usually a problem, but when you throw in cable television and/or an unbundled phone line, you may find yourself moving to an area that falls outside the coverage area of the bundle provider.

Chatter box?
Despite large providers such as Sky and Virgin Media offering ‘free’ evening and weekend calls with their bundles, the call costs outside of these times can be higher than you're used to.

If you are a heavy phone user you will probably be better off choosing a smaller provider such as TalkTalk, who offer more competitive phone rates – although your broadband bandwidth is likely to be smaller as a result.

Look for:

The best customer service
Recent product reviews have cited customer services as a recurrent downfall among the larger broadband bundle providers. Outsourcing call centres to foreign countries, long periods on hold and failure to rectify problems are infuriating problems we can all relate to.

On a more positive note, many of the smaller providers have obviously recognised the benefit of ‘keeping the customer happy’ and are getting good feedback regarding their product quality and technical support services.

A note worth making though is that you should never give too much credence to online user reviews as very often these tend to be written in a rage of fury and lack the kind of objectivity required to make an accurate judgement. After all, we've all been furious with a company, only to discover later that we'd forgot to plug in the PC. Fortunately many broadband bundle providers are now offering a 30 day moneyback guarantee - Virgin Media in particular - which allows you to test out their bundle service before committing.

Watch out for:

Cancellation costs
The business theory behind a broadband bundle is simple: The more items you rely on a provider for, the less chance there is of you switching services, as the hassle of changing outweigh the reasons for wanting to leave. i.e. once you’re in, you won’t leave!

To increase the strength of this practise, broadband bundle providers often add on extra costs to prevent you from leaving.

All companies will tie you in to a contract of usually a year or more and impose penalties if you break that contact. In addition to this, if you are toying with the idea of dropping your BT line in favour of a provider such as Virgin Media or TalkTalk, bear in mind that you will have to pay BT £115 if you want to reconnect again in the future.

Don’t forget:

Coverage
Before you spend days researching the best deals, make sure you know which providers do and don’t cover your area.

Sky, for example, run their broadband product through an ADSL line using a combination of their own unbundled phoneline network as well as BT’s copper-wire network (other companies such as Tiscali and Orange do the same) and, as such, Sky boasts approximately 98% UK coverage for it’s products. Although remember that if you fall outside of their unbundled area, the costs are different. This is in comparison to Virgin Media, whose cable network is currently available to just 55% of UK homes.

How do you check for this? Our phoneline checker on each of the provider pages (Virgin Media | Sky | TalkTalk | Orange | Tiscali) will check this for you, but you can also check when you sign up on the broadband provider's site itself.

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