In today’s world and market we see all sorts of advertisements for different broadband providers all offering different benefits and advantages, yet all claiming to be the best. Well ok, there is nothing wrong with offering different advantages and claiming that your set of benefits is better than a competitors, this after all is the whole point of marketing and how you draw customers in.

But how do you, the customer, decipher these offers and find out which provider and package is the one for you? The simple answer to this one is that there is no definitive way to tell everything apart and to say provider B is better than Provider A but worse than provider D.

What I hope to achieve below is to help you in establishing your needs and how to establish a suitable provider from an unsuitable provider dependant on these needs. Now before I begin I just need to point out that I will be using some terms that you may find confusing or be confused by. These are ADSL and LLU. Now both are a type of broadband, and the difference between them is more than I wish to explain here (as I may confuse you further). So to keep things easy let us just think of ADSL as being the first generation of broadband and LLU as being the latest generation of broadband (although I know people will argue this kind of terminology, so to these people I would like to remind them that this article is meant to be a basic one for people just venturing out into wanting to learn about broadband etc).

The way in which I would look for and decide on a new Broadband provider for myself is in the following way. I have attached a downloadable and printable PDF document HERE which is going to act as our comparison notes. So please feel free to print it out and follow along.

The steps I take are;

1. Establish a monthly budget for my broadband
2. Establish who provides LLU in my exchange
3. Establish my requirements for the broadband
4. Research the packages available from providers (and establish restrictions with these packages)
5. After creating a shortlist, I look for customers actual comments by searching google

Step 1

This step should be pretty self explanatory, each of us has a different budget on what we are willing to pay.

Step 2

In order to complete this step we need to look at another website and do a little search. If you go to samknows.com (just click this website name) and enter your telephone number and post code in, not forgetting to click on the Check button, you will be presented with some results.

Now depending on where you live and what exchange you are connected to, depends on the outcome. Below you will see 2 screen shots, one is of the exchange I connect to and the other is of an exchange located in a village. The yellow highlighted area (note I put the highlight in) indicates that you can get ADSL where you live, and the green highlighted area indicates what LLU providers are present at your exchange. If you do not have a list other than the BT Wholesale ADSL and ADSL Max showing for your exchange I am afraid that you are limited to the standard ADSL products.

Step 3

Again this step is one that will change with person to person. But my requirements that I will be noting down are;

1. Website browsing and researching
2. High usage allowance due to my web design work and various other tasks
3. Fast speed, again due to the file transfers and because I like BBC iPlayer and ITVplayer

I could have actually added a lot more (because I have some very specific needs, but I think that the above is just fine for this article).

Step 4

Ok in this step I would now go round each of the LLU providers website in turn (we established these in step 2) and find out what packages they offered. I would also look round other providers offering normal ADSL so I am not leaving a stone unturned, but realistically LLU would already address requirement #3 of my requirements.

LLU is capable of offering a far fast and superior connection to normal ADSL. Again I will leave the why’s out but it boils down to it being a different kind of broadband technology.

Whilst doing this step make sure you don’t fall into the trap of the word “Unlimited downloads” still used by many providers. On a regular basis you would need to look at the small print to see if there are mentions of “FUP – Fair Usage Policy”, “AUP – Acceptable Usage Policy” or similar terms. If there are it may be worth calling that provider to get a better idea of what kind of usage constitutes Fair or Acceptable. When calling, keep one thing in mind, you are calling to find out what the Fair or Acceptable ‘USAGE’ is in Gigabytes or Megabytes, not the number of downloads. A sales rep often uses the number of downloads as a way of not disclosing the usage level as technically you could get an endless number of downloads depending on file size.

Step 5

Finally in this step we want to create a shortlist. I typically rule out all providers who are too restrictive or over priced for my needs. The more free reign I have the better for me. Now out of all the providers I looked at (which was all the LLU ones in the image above and some ADSL ones) I have decided to short list, Sky and Be. All that remains to be done now is for me to take a look at what other people thought about the service. For this I would use google and start searching for things like Sky customer feedback, or Bee customer feedback. Like all the way through this article, it is now time for you to decide who would make the better broadband provider for you. Something to note though is that unhappy users always kick and scream louder than the happy ones, and so it is possible that if viewing other users feedback with a narrow mind you may see the wrong picture. Try and stay open minded when reading them.

Well I hope this article has helped you and good luck in finding a better suited broadband provider.