WiFi

We need to get wifi in our house. All the sites and deals are confusing to me. 

I have had EE 4G wireless broadband recommended to me.  But I just need wifi, nothing else. I am likely going to buy a used phone and use Giff Gaff.  Also, we don't plan on a landline so would rather avoid paying for one. Advice? We are in London

I've ended up going for Sky Broadband, which means paying for a landline, but I do get high speed fibre optic unlimited which is what I need. I have never used the landline so it's only there for the Internet.

I did have a 15GB EE 4G mobile broadband until a few months ago but although it was fast, it wasn't enough data for me and I was paranoid about going over the allowance each month.

If you can find a home broadband offer that means no landline (not sure if that's possible or not), I would recommend that over 4G.


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DH works in IT and is the go-to guy for anything computer-related in his family.

We have Virgin broadband and it's what he suggests for anyone who asks. We don't need a landline or anything tv-related, just internet, so that's all we have.

Besides a few outages recently (possibly due to crazy amounts of building works going on in the neighbourhood), we haven't had any problems. I work from home (all online) and have no complaints about the speed. We're in London.

If you need something temporary until you get set up, we like the Three PAYG data sim. We've had a few that we've used for travel (no extra charges in Europe) and it's our backup internet at home (since I work from home). It does require a dongle/MiFi device but I think you can get something from them for a bit more. We have our own MiFi device and right now we have a 15GB sim that cost £30 and is valid for one year. We prefer having PAYG for data so we're not stung with any surprise bills at the end of the month.

I put my postcode into Money Supermarket and found some Virgin Broadband only deals but they were as expensive or more so than I'm paying for unlimited broadband and unlimited landline calls with BT.
So don't limit yourself to only looking at the broadband only deals, it may be cheaper to take landline too, even if you don't intend to use it.

http://www.moneysupermarket.com

You have to rent a landline to have broadband. Try Uswitch.com with your postcode and you'll be able to sort by price and special offer/reward for signing up with each provider.

BT have a thing where you can pay by the month and use BT open world wifi hotspots.  Since every BT installation creates a public hot spot, it's very likely that one or more of your neighbors have one.  You could sign up immediately with this just by going to the open world site and getting a user name and password.  Then you'll have just wifi with nothing else required. 

We did this when we moved into our new house before we arranged broadband and it worked fine.  It might be just as expensive as getting your own connection but at least you won't need a landline.

Why in the world would BT think that it's OK to force you to set up a public hot spot so they can sell your broadband to your neighbors?  Unbelievable!

You do not need to rent a landline for broadband. We have had virgin broadband and as we are Vonage subscribers as well, we didn't need the phone line. We haven't paid a line rental in 3 years.

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Yes I was wrong about needing a phone line. The exception is Virgin, and you need to be in an area where Virgin cable lines run to your home. Not available in any of the areas where I've lived in the UK.

Vodafone now offer home broadband with no line rental. Saw the advert earlier today

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When I had Virgin Broadband with cable they still insisted I get s land line for no reason other than it was an excuse to make me pay more. 

I'm sure there's deals where they don't make you do it and I've seen the ads, but they don't call this "Rip Off Britain " for nothing.  There will be a catch.

When I had Virgin Broadband with cable they still insisted I get s land line for no reason other than it was an excuse to make me pay more. 

I'm sure there's deals where they don't make you do it and I've seen the ads, but they don't call this "Rip Off Britain " for nothing.  There will be a catch.

We have to use them for TV because we can't have Sky in our area.

Out of all of the utility companies we use, I dislike dealing with them the most.  They are *so* greedy and the customer service is beyond terrible.

Actually, I'm generally pretty happy with all of the others but I really just can't stand them .

Don't get me started on Virgin  customer service!  We called up to cancel when we moved and for reasons of incompetence and greed that would take too long to type, they never actually cancelled the contract.  A few months later they start demanding more money and sending me letters from a made up collection agency. 

I must have spent 40 hours dealing with those idiots trying to get it all sorted out.  The worst bit was when I would get somebody on the phone who would swear they could sort out the whole mess, then a week later I would get another letter from the collection agency.  Repeat 5 times!

Thank you all! Still a bit confusing but a bit less. I signed up with BT but I have 14 days to cancel if I want to.  They can't actually set up the wifi until September 12 though! Does it usually take so long?

Don't get me started on Virgin  customer service!  We called up to cancel when we moved and for reasons of incompetence and greed that would take too long to type, they never actually cancelled the contract.  A few months later they start demanding more money and sending me letters from a made up collection agency. 

I must have spent 40 hours dealing with those idiots trying to get it all sorted out.  The worst bit was when I would get somebody on the phone who would swear they could sort out the whole mess, then a week later I would get another letter from the collection agency.  Repeat 5 times!

Yeah, I feel your pain!
I could feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about my last interaction with them.

I don't think Virgin is an option at our address, but sounds like that's no loss.