Our broadband was up for renewal recently, actually I lie, it wasn’t up for renewal – BT hiked their prices about six weeks before the end of our contract so we were allowed to leave with no penalties. Sky practically paid us to join them though!

There’s a bit of a caveat here, I generally don’t need much support for broadband we resolve our own technical issues so long as the connection is up, so one broadband provider is pretty much the same as another.

We logged into TopCashback.co.uk account, to find out who would provide us with a good deal. Sky came out on top providing us with a years broadband free (on a one year contract), line rental and a call package coming to just over £20 per month (a significant saving on BT!) and we didn’t want Sky TV (we have FreeSat and a NOW TV box for the odd occasion we want Sky).

Add to that two offers:

• Buying through TopCashback.co.uk we’d get a credit for between £60 and £80, it varied a couple of times whilst we looked at it.
• Sky would then give us a £100 M&S Voucher or Prepaid Mastercard.

So in total we were being paid £180, to halve our bills and only on a one year contract – quite a result!

How’s it been?

The switch happened seamlessly and I just plugged in the new router and we were away. What have I found:

• The new router seems to cope better with my MacBook Air coming out of hibernation than the BT one did.
• When our NAS server does an upload it destroys connectivity, I’m going to talk to Crashplan about throttling it at certain times of day.