• Be There
  States plainly what packages there are to buy. Tech support pages look good at first glance
• Eclipse
  They look expensive and strongly marketed to me.
• Tesco
  Cheap and cheerful. I know a couple of people who use it and are happy
• Sky
  You won’t need a satellite dish, unless you take broadband + TV
• TalkTalk
  Reliable and well priced
• Virgin
  We recommend for speed and reliability. Not that cheap though.
• BT
  When I used this supplier the service was very good, customer service was dreadful, and it took them ages to connect the line.
• Orange
  Ever met a ninja you couldn’t trust?
• PlusNet
• O2

If you are switching from another supplier, check out USwitch. Quite often suppliers offer discounts on their website.

Things to look out for:

• Discounts, if you have a mobile phone with the provider (orange, O2 etc)
• Minimum contract length
• The well hidden ‘* for the first three months’
• ex VAT prices. I didn’t see any in the list above, but it was common practice once upon a time
• Download speed. All sites should offer a page to calculate speed from postcode / tel. number
• Bundled TV / phone packages
• Misleading TV ads. Just ignore them.
• Do you have friends, family, colleagues using the provider?

Maybe you could knock up a checklist, or spreadsheet to compare suppliers, and spend one very boring evening on all the websites above? The above list will not be complete I’m sure.

I currently subscribe to a 10MB service, and I’ll keep checking http://www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk/ come then.

Virgin Media has proved to be very reliable at both my addresses (I don’t own two houses! I moved). It is not the cheapest, but it is reliable, always provides 9.3MB+ download speed according to the speed checker, comes with a decent TV / phone package, and the customer service is good. Now if only the TV wasn’t 101 channels of nothing worth watching.

ADSL (phone line) broadband connection speeds vary wildly across Huddersfield, so make sure you know what you are getting before signing up.