- Original Poster
- #1
Hopefully, a discussion on this is timely and useful for people.
The analogue switchoff has prompted me to move us to VOIP and in doing so I have switched to subscribing to separate cloud VOIP and Broadband contracts, a policy which annoys the telecom sales people but give us better flexibility. (incidentally, I believe VOIP intrinsically should be cheaper than the old phone system but I've noticed the big telecom companies are using the transition to fool their unsuspecting customers into paying way over the odds and in many cases more than you used to pay...). I now want to switch our broadband-only subscription and for redundancy, only a setup with a 4G/5G backup will do. Currently we use Virgin Media but their O2 4G backup has never worked for us and we find Virgin's reliability not very good.
BT do this and probably EE has the best signal in our area so that's the obvious choice. Their website currently gives me 2 deals that include the backup:
Standard Fibre 76 Essential £27.95 pm + £8 Hybrid backup add-on = £35.95pm. 2 year contract.
Standard Fibre 76 Enhanced £37.95pm [it's worth paying the extra £2 for to get the other benefits/add-ons]. 2 year contract.
BT sales people regularly ring and I asked one of them for any better deals and got this:
£33.95 Free install / £9.95 Hub delivery – 5 year contract. SOEGA enhanced - Single order Generic Ethernet Access
£39.95 Free install / £9.95 Hub delivery – 3 year contract
I'm not keen to be tied in for 3+ years and anyway the 3 year is more expensive than the default Enhanced. Salesman was not clear about what the difference/benefit of the SOEGA thing is over the Enhanced package [anyone know?]. I also rang EE who offer the same and can do it a bit cheaper if you already have an EE contract in the business name but this does not apply to us.
Does anyone know of any other options with decent 4G backup? Thanks for any advice/input.
The analogue switchoff has prompted me to move us to VOIP and in doing so I have switched to subscribing to separate cloud VOIP and Broadband contracts, a policy which annoys the telecom sales people but give us better flexibility. (incidentally, I believe VOIP intrinsically should be cheaper than the old phone system but I've noticed the big telecom companies are using the transition to fool their unsuspecting customers into paying way over the odds and in many cases more than you used to pay...). I now want to switch our broadband-only subscription and for redundancy, only a setup with a 4G/5G backup will do. Currently we use Virgin Media but their O2 4G backup has never worked for us and we find Virgin's reliability not very good.
BT do this and probably EE has the best signal in our area so that's the obvious choice. Their website currently gives me 2 deals that include the backup:
Standard Fibre 76 Essential £27.95 pm + £8 Hybrid backup add-on = £35.95pm. 2 year contract.
Standard Fibre 76 Enhanced £37.95pm [it's worth paying the extra £2 for to get the other benefits/add-ons]. 2 year contract.
BT sales people regularly ring and I asked one of them for any better deals and got this:
£33.95 Free install / £9.95 Hub delivery – 5 year contract. SOEGA enhanced - Single order Generic Ethernet Access
£39.95 Free install / £9.95 Hub delivery – 3 year contract
I'm not keen to be tied in for 3+ years and anyway the 3 year is more expensive than the default Enhanced. Salesman was not clear about what the difference/benefit of the SOEGA thing is over the Enhanced package [anyone know?]. I also rang EE who offer the same and can do it a bit cheaper if you already have an EE contract in the business name but this does not apply to us.
Does anyone know of any other options with decent 4G backup? Thanks for any advice/input.
