Hi. I went with Sky broadband on a 12 month contract. There are also month-to-month options, but they do cost more. It was about a two weeks - they mailed the router with setup instructions, and I did the rest. You get something like 14 days to change your mind, if, after it's up and running, you are not happy with it.
It's not fiber-optic, but I think that BT re-wired my general area of town a couple of years ago for high speed as part of some sort of generic internet upgrade for Glasgow (
). The catch is, your speed is restricted by the slowest part of your physical connection. So if, in fact, there's fiber out at the street, there's only copper wire coming into our building and we plug into the old BT slot. That said, we've had no problem with streaming movies, etc., and have no cap on usage - a lot of the packages out there do seem to cap your use.
We also have a free VOIP phone service thrown in, but pay for use at any time other than 7pm-7am. (Since we don't use the phone much, that's ok. It's more for people to phone in.)
We set up via credit card, but then moved to direct debit. We're paying about 20 pounds a month for the first year. I assume we'll renegotiate or switch to a different provider after the first year if the cost increases.
For gas/electric we're with SSE on their standard tarriff. There's one that would be slightly cheaper with them, but has a "leaving" fee per fuel if we want to switch at any point. We are free to leave on the standard. It seems a good deal.
