Find the best phone, broadband and TV deals

ByMiles Brignall

Now's the time to switch phone, broadband and TV. We guide you through the telecoms maze to the package that suits you

 Illustration: Jay Taylor

BT has raised prices three times in little over a year. If you are still paying separately for phone, broadband and digital TV, or have never switched providers, now is the time to make a move. So what are the best deals?

1. Average household

User type A family or couple who make plenty of calls during the day and use broadband regularly to do basic surfing and look at email. Unlikely to be downloading huge files or gaming. Happy to watch Freeview – don't pay for Sky.
Recommendation Plusnet or TalkTalk.
You are the biggest group of home phone/broadband users and the ones most targeted by the companies vying to attract your business. If you are still with BT you are paying around £358 a year for your package which includes the landline, Anytime calls, and the basic broadband service – capped at 10Gb a month. Your prices are going to rise 5% in December.
The table shows that if you switch to one of two companies that are most actively marketing on price – Plusnet and TalkTalk – you can save £130 in your first year and around £90 a year in the second year. The cheapest deal, the Plusnet package, is similarly capped. The slightly pricier TalkTalk package offers unlimited downloads – subject to a fair use caveat.
One thing to look for is a deal that includes 0845 and 0870 calls. These have now become so prevalent that anyone signing up to a package that doesn't include them could end up very much out of pocket. The Tesco deal in the table doesn't include such calls, and neither do plenty of other firms.
If you are wondering whether you need a package that includes Anytime calls, rest assured that you do. The cost of making a landline call with BT has risen by 40.7% since 1 April 2010, and December's increase will add a further 5%. It means that you only need to make a couple of calls a day to be financially up on the deal.
So which firm should you go with? Plusnet's better customer service feedback and cheaper prices make this the one to go for assuming you're a basic broadband user. If you need unlimited downloads or you make lots of international calls go to TalkTalk. For an extra £3 a month it offers an international calls boost – free calls (up to an hour) to 36 countries. It's a no-brainer if you call, say Ireland or Italy, three times a week.
Meanwhile, if you are a happy BT customer, you don't want to switch, and you can afford to pay £120 in one go, opt to pay your landline fees upfront annually. This will save over £31 a year when BT increases its landline price to £14.60 a month in December.

 2. The all-in package
User type Households that want everything from the digital world. Digital TV complete with on-demand material, all-the-calls-you-can-make home phone package, and the full unrestricted broadband experience.
Recommendation Virgin – if you can get it.
You are in the lucrative group of consumers – those prepared to spend more on their Sky TV and telecoms package than the nation spends on bread – typically £400-£500 a year. Until recently the pay-to-view TV market was dominated by the Murdoch-owned Sky and rival cable company, Virgin. These two are still rivals, each persuading you they offer the biggest selection of live sports and the latest movies. However, there is at least an alternative.
BT Vision offers a half-way house between the complete Sky packages and the basic Freeview.
To get it, you have to take BT's home phone and broadband, and you get a digital box that will record programmes and allow you to access on-demand material. Viewers get the Sky rival ESPN, which offers live sports from around the world, including some Premiership football matches as part of the deal. You can also add Sky Sports 1 and 2 for an extra monthly fee (£12.40 for one or £17.40 for both).
Perhaps of greater interest will be the fact that BT Vision customers can access BBC iPlayer on their TV. No need to huddle round a laptop to catch that episode of The Killing or a BBC4 documentary you missed.
Virgin Media customers get the same offering via the latest Virgin digital boxes. They also get the fastest broadband services in the UK via its cable network.
The secret of this market is to decide which TV deal you want – there are too many permutations to go into here. However, you need to add the phone and broadband package to that deal. If you are a committed Sky TV fan there's no advantage to not taking Sky's home phone package, too. The same goes for Virgin, and if you want to try the hybrid BT Vision, you have to take its telecoms deal.
If you are a serious gaming freak or spend hours file sharing/downloading, Virgin is offering the UK's fastest 100Mb broadband service. Again, look to see whether your chosen package includes 0845 calls – Sky and Virgin don't, but BT does. Virgin offers the cheapest access to this market, but to get the best deal you need to go through the likes of consumerchoices.co.uk which have better deals than you would obtain if you go direct.

3. Leisure user

User type The sort of couple or individual who are out at work all day and only makes phone calls in the evenings and at weekends. They are also frequent users of the internet in their leisure time.
Recommendation Plusnet.
If you are at work all day, or out of the house during normal office hours, there's no need to be paying for a phone package that offers free calls when you're not at home. All the big firms now offer a landline deal, with free calls from 7pm-6am to other landlines, plus broadband – and the prices are very reasonable. For £187 a year – or an average monthly fee of £15.58 – Plusnet will supply just that. Rivals TalkTalk and the likes of the Post Office aren't far behind. Telecoms small fry, Primus Saver, is challenging the big firms, and to get the price quoted in the table you have to sign up through consumerchoices.co.uk. Unlike its rivals, calls to 0845/70 numbers aren't included in its calls package. Plusnet has the cheapest deal, but TalkTalk offers a more generous monthly download capacity. That could be the clincher if you like to watch programmes on iPlayer or enjoy file sharing. But for basic internet and email, Plusnet should suffice.
Note that households on these deals won't have to make many calls in the daytime to make it worth upgrading to an Anytime calls package. These are BT's most popular tariffs with good reason. If there's a change to your work patterns that results in daytime home phone use, upgrade quickly. Two other deals are also worth looking at. If you are an Orange or O2 mobile customer, consider their home phone/broadband packages, which are also good value.

4. Landline only

User type The person or couple who has a home phone and who doesn't want broadband; someone who just needs a cheap or basic landline telephone deal.
Recommendation Primus.
They may be an ever diminishing group – those who don't have a computer at home and don't want broadband – but there are still some big savings to be made. As the Consumer Choices table shows, it is now possible to get a landline and an all-the-calls-you-can-make package for just over £150 a year – a saving of £70 over the company most of us are still with, BT.
The cheapest company in this market is now Primus. Its Phone Max plan is available for £12.79 a month (including the landline when bought via consumerchoices.co.uk) which is a bit of a bargain when you consider BT or TalkTalk's landline alone will soon cost around £14.60 a month. Included in the deal are all the landline calls you can make, although customers preferring to receive a paper bill (rather than email) are charged an additional £1.50 per month.
The only downsides to the deal are that you have to sign an 18-month contract and you will be charged extra for calling mobiles and 0845 and 0870 numbers, which are free to BT customers. The rates, though, are some of the lowest.
The company is also bringing all its call centres back from abroad to Lancashire, if that's appealing to you.
BT customers who are generally happy, want to stay where they are, but would like their bills reduced, should pre-pay their landline charges (£120) to save around £30 a year.
Meanwhile if you want the absolute basic, low-cost landline only – where you pay for every call you make – Primus's most basic product costs just £81 a year, when you go through Consumer Choices. This is perfect for those with elderly relatives who rarely make outbound calls but want a landline that allows them to be rung up to check they are fine, or for a chat. At £81 it is around half the cost of having a BT line.

Other considerations 1. iPad deals

iPad owners looking to use their tablets away from Wi-Fi hotspots can now buy airtime that allows them to connect to the web via a 3G mobile phone signal.
iPad 2s have a slot that allows you to put in a 3G micro sim card and, when you've got one from a phone network, you're ready to connect on the move. There are a range of packages to choose from. O2 offers 200Mb and unlimited Wi-Fi for £2.04 a day. Orange has a similar, faster connecting deal for £2 a day, but it doesn't include Wi-Fi. For £7.50 a month Three offers a sim allowing 1Gb of data a month. The sim is free and the contract is on a 30-day rolling basis. T-Mobile offers 500Mb per week for £7, while Vodafone will charge £15 for 2Gb a month. As a guide, 500Mb gives you 5,000 web pages, 100 songs or one hour of video downloads.

2. Broadband-only deals

If you are one of the growing number of mobile phone addicts who rarely use their landline, you may be wondering whether to ditch it altogether and save the £158 it is costing you. Unfortunately, unless you are living in a street that has access to the Virgin cable network, you cannot get to a home broadband service without a landline. Virgin will supply a broadband-only service but at £21 a month (£16 for the first three months) it is no cheaper than having a phone line. An alternative is to go with Primus's basic phone and broadband package, which costs £15.78 a month. You get a landline with free calls in the evenings and weekends and up to 20Gb of data downloads a month.

3. Internet spead and download limits

Broadband deals present you with a range of speeds – typically up to 20Mb– and a host of monthly download limits. The speed of the service you get depends on the distance between your home and your telephone exchange. When Ofcom looked at this issue last December, it found consumers were getting on average a 6.2Mb service – less than half of the then average advertised broadband speed of 13.8Mb. Since then the advertised rates have risen to 20Mb.
In reality, few internet users will notice much difference between a 4Mb and 6Mb service unless they are downloading huge files, at which point the difference in download times starts to be noticed. For everyday internet searching, it makes little difference.
However, for many buyers a more pressing question is how much download limit they require. Michael Phillips of consumerchoices.co.uk says a basic 10Gb monthly limit will be more than enough for internet users who just surf the web, book tickets or send email. However, if you are an avid user of catch-up TV such as BBC iPlayer, (or you have teenage children who spend their lives on the web streaming films etc) you will soon exhaust a 10Gb limit, and should be looking for a package that offers 40Gb a month, or ideally an "unlimited" deal.
A 40Gb a month limit gives you 24 hours a day of internet browsing, 1,500 emails a day to send, 340 music downloads a month and nine hours of video downloads – all in the same month. Most families won't exceed that.
Meanwhile, note that "unlimited downloads" rarely means truly without limit. You will find that most ISP state a fair use policy applies. The suppliers will generally ignore oversized downloading for a month or two, and will then get in touch asking that you curb your usage. If, however, you continue to exceed the limits they are likely to restrict your service at peak times.

And … how to switch

If you haven't moved broadband supplier for a while – or perhaps you are still with the same supplier since your dial-up access was replaced with broadband – you could well be paying over the odds for your connection. The latest figures show that around 40% of households haven't switched in the past two years, so it is worth ringing your provider (or looking at your bills) to establish what you are paying and what you are getting for your money in terms of speed and download limits.
To check who's offering what in your area, use an accredited switching site. Consumerchoices.co.uk or the Guardian's own service guardian.co.uk/digitalcomparison or calling 0800 8405411, are the best starting points. They will show the exact price you'll pay for having the service in your home. You may not get the headline prices you see in these tables, as the exact deal will depend on your local exchange. Going through the switching sites seems to generate the biggest discounts.
If you don't want to switch but want a better deal, call your supplier and ask for your MAC code, which you'll need to switch supplier. You will find that you are swiftly put through to the customer retention department, and a much improved offer will materialise.
Remember, if you are "upgraded" to a faster, cheaper service be aware you may be locked into a new contract – usually for 12 or 18 months. Most of the phone companies are offering new customers free or reduced deals for the first three or six months, and if you threaten to leave you should get the same offer.
Source http://www.guardian.co.uk/