From Sky to Virgin Media, TalkTalk and more, there's no shortage of broadband providers to choose from nowadays.

Advertisement

According to Ofcom's Communications Market Report 2023, there were 28 million fixed broadband connections in the UK at the end of 2022, an increase of seven per cent in comparison to 2021. The number of superfast broadband lines delivering download speeds of 30Mbit/s or higher also increased by five per cent to 23.4 million in 2022, and by the end of last year, 83 per cent of lines were superfast or faster.

So why are so many people hesitant to switch broadband providers if their supplier isn't delivering on these superfast speeds? Many said that they simply didn't think it was worth the hassle, leaving them to accept buffering wheels and lagging shows with a sigh.

However, with many more people working from home now, this is no longer an option. It’s not just keeping curious children or pets out of video calls that makes working from home so difficult, it’s the strain the added online use can put on your Wi-Fi.

If your broadband isn’t passing muster, it's time to start looking elsewhere, and the RadioTimes.com team have you covered. As well as putting together guides to help you get the telly you love for less, such as our Sky Sports deals, TNT Sports deals, and NOW deals, throughout the year, we've also been keeping an eager eye on the most genuine Black Friday savings.

Just take a look at our PSVR2 Black Friday deals and PS5 Black Friday deals for the top gaming console deals, and the best iPad Black Friday deals, Apple Watch Black Friday deals, and AirPods Black Friday deals for all things Apple.

But for now, we've put together the ultimate guide to finding the best new broadband deal for you, including some FAQs and money-saving deals from across the web, and the best deal we've seen so far is one from Virgin Media: pay absolutely nothing for the first three months of M250 Fibre broadband and save £97.50, plus there's no initial setup fee. We've highlighted this deal below, so be sure to check it our for more information. Happy shopping!

Haven't you heard? It's Black Friday season! We've rounded up some of the top tech deals we've found so far to help you save – from the best Black Friday TV deals to the best Black Friday Xbox deals and best Black Friday Kindle deals.

Jump to:

Pay nothing for M250 Fibre Broadband until February 2024 at Virgin Media this Black Friday season

Black Friday season is well and truly under way, with deals pouring in across a range of retailers and products. If you want to save on fibre broadband, Virgin Media is giving you the chance to pay absolutely nothing for the first three months of M250 Fibre broadband – that's a saving of £97.50, plus there's no initial setup fee. 

This 18-month contract is ideal for busy households with more than ten devices on the go, thanks to its 264Mbps download speed and 25Mbps upload speed. After the first three months the price will revert back to £32.50. 

Best Black Friday broadband deals this November

If you're looking for broadband deals, you've chosen the perfect time. It's Black Friday season and the deals are pouring in – we've rounded up the best ones we've seen so far, as well as some amazing evergreen offers.

Black Friday broadband sales already live:

Get 100Mb/s Full Fibre Broadband for £28 per month and no setup fee

What's the deal: Sky is offering a special Black Friday price of £28 a month for 18 months for its 100Mb/s full fibre broadband. There's also the added bonus of no setup fee.

Why we chose it: 100Mb/s is an ideal speed for streaming, gaming and working from home. This is a huge saving on an 18-month contract.

Get 100Mb/s Full Fibre Broadband for £28 per month and no setup fee

Get Sky Stream, Sky TV and Netflix with Sky Superfast Broadband

What's the deal: Purchase Sky Superfast Broadband for £36 a month and you'll also get subscriptions to Sky Stream, Sky TV and Netflix throughout the duration of the 18-month contract.

Why we chose it: The combination of the three streaming services means that you'll have access to a wide range of TV shows and movies, as well as exclusive comedies and documentaries, in addition to Sky Superfast Broadband with a speed of 61Mb/s.

Get Sky Stream, Sky TV and Netflix with Sky Superfast Broadband for £36 per month

Get M250 Fibre Broadband, Sky Cinema HD and more for free for the first three months

What's the deal: Listen up movie lovers – Virgin is offering Sky Cinema alongside its M250 fibre broadband, 200+ TV channels and unlimited weekend calls to landline numbers completely for free for the first three months. After that, the price will revert back to £68 a month.

Why we chose it: Three months' free WiFi, TV, weekend calls and Sky Cinema is a pretty incomparable deal and one of the best we've seen this Black Friday season. You can expect speeds of 264 Mbps and upload speeds of 25 Mbps, and you'll even have access to perks and experiences through Priority.

Get M250 Fibre Broadband, Sky Cinema HD and more for free for the first three months

Pay nothing for Ultrafast broadband until Spring 2024 with BT

What's the deal: BT is offering three months of free Ultrafast broadband with speeds ranging from 50Mb download speed to 900Mb download speed, alongside free postage and packaging and no upfront costs.

Why we chose it: This deal means you could be saving up to anywhere from £98.97 to £149.97 on your broadband – that's seriously impressive.

Pay nothing for Ultrafast broadband until Spring 2024 with BT

Get three months of free Full Fibre broadband at EE

What's the deal: EE has jumped on the bandwagon of offering three months free broadband. That means you can get free Full Fibre connection that's 44 times faster than standard fibre.

Why we chose it: After three months, you'll need to pay the standard price of £31.99 a month, which means before hand you'll be saving a whopping £95.97.

Get three months of free Full Fibre broadband at EE

Get full fibre broadband up to 900Mb for £24.99 a month

What's the deal: Plusnet is offering customers the chance to snap up its fastest broadband ever for just £24.99 a month. You'll also get a Plusnet rewards card, available to use in many high street stores.

Why we chose it: Plusnet's full fibre is known for its rock-solid reliability and is up to 25x faster than previous iterations. A Plusnet rewards card is also a massive advantage – it comes preloaded with money to be spent online and at selected high street stores.

Get full fibre broadband up to 900Mb for £24.99 a month

Choosing the best broadband

The UK broadband marketplace is a busy one, with a number of major internet service providers offering an array of different services. The choice is overwhelming, to say the least. Luckily, we’ve put together a list of the best mainstream broadband offers right now, followed by a guide to help you pick the right one for you.

More like this

Which broadband provider is best?

Which broadband provider is best?

Here’s a list of all the major companies that offer broadband in the UK. There are lots of companies that offer other services, whether that be phone contracts or TV channels.

BT

According to one Ofcom survey, 25 per cent of broadband users in the UK have BT as their provider, making it the most popular ISP. The veteran telecoms company offer a number of separate broadband packages – they’re not the cheapest out there, but the speed connections are impressive.

Virgin Media

Virgin Media has a solid reputation as an ISP that delivers consistently solid connections for its users. In fact, on its website, the company states its speeds are on average nine times higher than its competitors. Alongside standalone broadband, Virgin also offers packages with phone line rental and some bundles with TV channels too.

Sky

Sky offers three different tiers of broadband service: Essential (11Mbps), Superfast (59Mbps) and Ultrafast (145Mbps) across an 18-month contract. As you would probably expect, you can also pick up various Sky TV channels from a range of bundle packages.

TalkTalk

The winner of USwitch’s Most Popular Broadband Provider award in both 2019 and 2020, TalkTalk forged a name for itself by offering some of the most competitive rates on the market. You can pick from a range of separate connection speeds, as well as a number of packages that include the TalkTalk TV box with channels including NOW.

Plusnet

Plusnet is another ISP that offers some of the most affordable broadband services in the UK. It offers three different tiers of service – the lowest offers a meagre average connection speed of 10Mbps, but if you do little besides browsing and check your emails, that might be perfect for you.

Shell Energy

The broadband division of Shell Energy has enjoyed a boost of late, largely because it just bought out the Post Office’s broadband service, taking all its customers with it. The company seems very eager to draw in new customers, currently offering an Amazon voucher of £25 or £50 with whichever of its three services you pick.

NOW Broadband

NOW Broadband comes in three different tiers as per the usual – Super Fibre, Fab Fibre and Brilliant Broadband. Better still, there’s no activation fee, just £10 for delivery of the box.

EE

EE is probably best known as a mobile phone network, but it also offers a range of broadband packages. The phone network boasts three different connection tiers – Fibre 36 essentials, Fibre 50 essentials and Fibre 67. Also, if you have EE mobile, you can unlock unlimited data by adding EE broadband.

Vodafone

With relatively high average connection speeds at the more affordable end of the market, Vodafone ostensibly offers good value for money – but it would be remiss of us not to mention that according to Ofcom, it was the ISP that received the most complaints in 2020. The provider has also launched Vodafone Pro II which promises Wi-Fi in every room from just £36.50 a month. Pro II is designed for busy households using multiple devices at the same time.

Which broadband providers are the cheapest?

Which broadband providers are the cheapest?

We’ve taken a look through all the major UK broadband providers and listed the ISPs with the lowest costs below, along with their most affordable packages and their average connection speeds.

How to choose the best broadband deal: tips before buying

  • When does your current contract end? Unless your current provider is borderline unusable, it might make more sense in the financial long term to wait it out. (And if your provider really is that bad, you should consider launching a formal complaint. More on that later.)
  • Decide upon what speed service you’ll need – it will make searching for the right service so much easier. We’ll dive into this in the next section.
  • Think ahead to the contract length that’s best for you – these are typically either one or two years (and providers would happily have you for longer, but Ofcom banned 3-year contracts back in 2011).
  • Keep an eye out for extra costs besides monthly rates – they might not be hidden per se, but providers certainly won’t shout about them either. You should see all the requisite activation and setup costs listed from the off, but make sure you click through to the checkout to be certain if you’re still deciding which to pursue.

What broadband speed do I need?

The unit to measure broadband speed is megabits per second (Mbps) – not megabytes (MB), which are comprised of eight megabits. You’ll see this list for download and upload speeds, which is simply which way the data is flowing, into your device or vice versa. It’s download speeds that are much more important.

Most basic or entry-level broadband packages will get you speeds of 0-12Mbps via an ADSL (non-fibre) connection. This is perfectly fine if you’re in a small household of just one or two people, and your internet needs are limited browsing and streaming a single device at a time.

Mid-range broadband services are generally in the vicinity of 25-50Mbps. This is a wise choice for families and busier households, who will be streaming to different devices at any one time – if there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s arguments over who’s hogging the bandwidth for Netflix. It’s probably the wisest choice if you stream 4K content to your television – for more on this, read our what is a 4K TV explainer.

Then you get to the high speeds of around 50-100Mbps. For many users, this kind of connection speed doesn’t really justify the extra cost, though fans of gaming will certainly appreciate the lag-free gameplay. Designers, filmmakers and other professionals who do lots of peer-to-peer sharing with exceptional large files might also find a high-tier service is worth the investment.

To find out more, make sure you read our full what broadband speed do I need explainer.

Can I get fibre broadband?

That’s a question that can be quickly answered by a couple of minutes on Google. All you’ll need to do is input your postcode on a comparison site or even one of the ISPs themselves, and you can instantly find out whether your area has fibre broadband.

The good news is that fibre broadband has come a long way since fibre cables were first rolled out in 2008. In the years since, they have been laid throughout the overwhelming majority of the UK, offering a faster internet connection than that of standard ADSL lines.

What broadband contract length should I go for?

The majority of broadband providers offer either 12-month or 24-month contracts. As mentioned, Ofcom enforced an industry-wide ban on contracts that were any longer, stating that it didn’t offer enough fair consumer choice – the regulator even ended up in a dispute with (the now-defunct) O2 Broadband, which pushed for three-year contracts.

As a general rule, the shorter the contract the better – it should definitely be a factor that guides which service you choose. Some ISPs, like NOW Broadband, do offer short-term rolling contracts, which renew themselves on a 30-day basis.

Do I have to pay for cancelling my broadband contract early?

Almost definitely, yes. Providers obviously want to deter you from leaving them, so you’ll likely be met with a hefty cancellation fee (or a similar label like ‘deactivation’, which amounts to the same thing). It’s why we urge you to see out the remainder of your contract if you can.

However, there are situations in which you won’t have to pay, and that’s if you’re not getting the connection speeds that were originally advertised. In fact, in 2019 Ofcom introduced a code of practice around honouring advertised speeds – it’s isn’t mandatory, but many of the major ISPs we listed above have signed up to it.

There’ll likely be a fair bit of red tape involved, but if it can be established that you haven’t had the level of service you paid for, you should be able to terminate your contract without incurring a fee.

Is Black Friday a good time to switch broadband?

Black Friday is a great time to switch broadband providers as many places such as BT, Virgin Media, Plusnet and Sky have fantastic deals on to help you save money this November. However, whether you're able to switch will depend on your contract; many suppliers offer 12 or 24-month contracts which you will be tied to until they run out.

Saying this, as we mentioned earlier, you might be able to get out of your contract early if you're not receiving the level of service you paid for.

Thinking about upgrading your television? Don’t miss our comprehensive best TV to buy guide.

Advertisement

For even more Black Friday deals, take a look at the best Samsung Black Friday deals, Ring Black Friday deals, Black Friday electric toothbrush deals and Black Friday spa breaks and deals.

Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement