Student Broadband

There's a lot to consider when finding and moving into student housing. Signing up for an appropriate broadband package that meets your needs and your budget can be a daunting task. There are a number of factors that you might need to take into account. We've put together this guide to help you out.

• Fixed line broadband
  • Short contract
  • Affordable price
  • Shared housing
  • Gaming
  • Bundles
  • Recommended deals
• Mobile broadband

Fixed line broadband

As a general rule, fixed line broadband (through your telephone line or via cable) is superior to mobile broadband for speed, usage allowance, responsiveness (latency) and reliability. This is especially true in shared households like the average student house. However, if fixed line broadband is particularly poor in your area, if you don't have access to the phone line in your student house or if your housemates were unable to agree on sharing a broadband connect, you may wish to skip to the mobile broadband section.

Short contracts

Most home broadband contracts usually last for 12 months or even longer. While this is fine when you live somewhere all year round, it's not ideal for students. You may be planning to be in your student accommodation for 9 months out of the year and head back to the family home for the Summer holiday. With a 12 month contract you could either end up having to pay for 3 months of broadband when you're not going to be there, or have to pay extra in order to end your contract early.

So, when looking for a broadband package, you'll want to find a broadband contract that lasts for 9 months or less. The most common short contracts available are 'no contract' or 'rolling' contracts where you can give a month's notice to leave at any time. While you may have to pay some extra setup fees, it's still cheaper than paying extra to terminate your contract, and you can of course stay in the contract for the full 12 months or longer if you should decide to stay on.

Virgin Media currently has a student broadband promotion offering special 9 month contracts on its 10Mb and 30Mb cable broadband services. O2 mobile customers can take advantages of a discount on O2 Home Broadband's no contract deals and Plusnet offers some of the cheapest short contract broadband regardless of what broadband technology's available in your area.

Providers to Consider: Virgin Media, O2, Plusnet, Eclipse

Affordable price

Let's face it, most students aren't rich, and many find themselves living off of beans on toast at the end of the month. You don't want to be spending more on broadband than you have to, so shopping around for a cheap and reliable broadband deal is a good idea.

Virgin Media have deals aimed at students, Plusnet has a price promise to be the cheapest standalone broadband and O2 Broadband offer a discount for existing mobile customers. If you're an Orange mobile phone customer or Sky TV customer, you'll also be able to enjoy competitive discounts on their broadband services, but these do not currently come with the option of shorter contracts.

Providers to Consider: O2, Virgin Media, Plusnet

Shared housing

If you're living on your own and you don't plan to use your connection for downloads or watching TV, you may find that cheaper packages with lower speeds and smaller allowances will be enough to fit your needs. However, students are more likely than the average person to be sharing their housing with others, which means sharing your Internet connection. Limited usage allowances can quickly run down when several people are active and, when even one housemate is using a slower connection for downloading files or watching videos, the others are likely to notice the difference.

However, a shared internet connection does have the advantage that you share the broadband bill, and so the more expensive packages with more features and allowances that you'll likely need become much more affordable. We recommend deals with at least 40GB of download allowance, and high-speed Fibre to the Cabinet or Virgin cable packages if they're available in your area.

Providers to Consider: Virgin Media, BE, O2, Plusnet Pro, Fibre Optic Broadband

Gaming

If you like to de-stress over the evening and weekends with a few hours of online gaming, you're going to need a broadband package that can deal with that. You want a reliable speed, a decent usage allowance, and a connection that isn't going to keep dropping your game during peak hours when everyone is online.

Plusnet's Pro Add On offers prioritised traffic over other users, Virgin Media offers the fastest connections in any area with no traffic management on its fastest deals and Eclipse's unique Connection Manager lets you adjust the priority of different types of traffic on the fly.

Providers to Consider: Plusnet Pro, Virgin Media, Eclipse

Bundles

You may think that you can save money by not taking a landline and relying on mobile phones. However all but Virgin Media's fixed line broadband require a landline to supply the broadband service. Luckily many broadband suppliers now offer their own phone packages with inclusive hours and may even offer to undercut BT's prices for line rental.

If your landlord allows you to change your call plan or line rental supplier, it's likely that a bundle deal that includes a phone package works out to be better value than taking broadband on its own. Some providers - for example, Virgin Media - also have bundle deals that include television packages. Just remember that line rental isn't usually quoted up front in the prices for these providers, but this is usually cheaper than line rental from BT.

Providers to Consider: Plusnet Value with Home Phone Evenings & Weekends, Virgin Media Broadband, TV and Phone for Students, Broadband Bundles

Mobile Broadband

Mobile broadband is a way to connect to the Internet using mobile phone networks rather than through a fixed landline. This is usually done by using a USB modem or dongle plugged into your computer. It's suitable for a number of uses, most notably its portability meaning you can use it anywhere that you can get a mobile signal. This means you can use it at home, in student accommodation, at friends' houses, in lecture halls or the local coffee shop. It can be useful to supplement a fixed line broadband service as a backup in case of your main Internet connection going down, or simply if you need to do something important while your housemates are busy gaming or streaming video. As it's not tied to any particular location, you don't have to worry so much about being tied into longer contracts, and if you're only an occasional user you can even take a pay as you go service and only pay for usage when you need it. If you're a very light Internet user and just need access for emails and browsing websites, mobile broadband may even be the sole broadband solution for you.

However, there are some pitfalls with mobile broadband. If you enjoy gaming, streaming video or other heavy downloading activities, then it's not suitable for your needs. Mobile broadband packages usually come with very small download allowances and expensive charges if you go over those limits. As connections rely on a mobile signal, you may well find that some areas have poor coverage. This means that you may find speeds to be very slow in some areas, though urban areas are usually well-covered. Latency (the time it takes for your connection to respond to a data request) is usually much worse with mobile than fixed line, this can make performance when streaming video, watching TV online or online gaming frustratingly poor.

Providers to Consider: Contract Mobile Broadband Pay As You Go Mobile Broadband