BT, Sky, Virgin broadband users urged to check their Wi-Fi immediately

Millions of consumers are being fooled by marketing campaigns promising record broadband speeds they simply don’t need, and often won’t even be able to take advantage of. thinkbroadband.com wants to help consumers and has developed a calculator tool that helps people work out what broadband speed they actually require.

Virgin Media has introduced a top speed of 2Gbps (gigabits per second) – almost 29x faster than the average household broadband speed. BT-owned Openreach is set to deliver 1.8Gbps download speeds for brands such as Sky, TalkTalk and Plusnet

However, Sebastien Lahtinen, Director at thinkbroadband.com says the ‘need for speed’ is something that has been constructed by broadband providers to demonstrate they are ahead of their rivals. He says: “Consumers are being misled into believing that having the latest, fastest, more expensive contracts must surely be the best option for them, but this isn’t true. Broadband providers offer faster and faster services in a bid to appear the fastest provider, but it’s not necessarily about getting consumers onto these fastest plans, but about perception of the provider being ahead of others.

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“If consumers stood back and looked at what their broadband needs actually are, the majority would be shocked to discover they are paying way too much for broadband speeds they simply don’t need. We would encourage everyone to upgrade to full-fibre from existing services, but there is no need to go for 500 Mbps if you are just two people with one big TV, a 4K streaming subscription, and mobile phones.”

Mr Lahtinen adds: “As with most things, there is no hard and fast rule, but if your household isn’t that busy you won’t need to pay for more than 100Mbps. Beyond that, it’s not about whether you can do a particular task, but how long you want to wait for it to complete. Most people won’t find a use for lightning-fast downloads.

“Environments such as student houses where there can be multiple people looking to complete numerous tasks at once is a good example for 1Gbps type speed, and if you’re an online gamer you need to consider other aspects of your broadband such as latency. This is the time it takes for a packet of data to go from your computer to a server, and back again. Also, you may benefit more from a faster upload speed, so don’t forget to look at that. The point is, it’s not all about pure download speed and consumers need to realise this or they’ll continue to waste money on packages they don’t need!”