I've had this "Pay £5.00 more for exactly the same and tie yourself into a 24-month contract too!" stupid offer. I am currently on BT's Fibre 1. I pay £38.48 pm for this but have negotiated a 'Special Discount of £8.11 which brings the monthly cost down to £30.37. My broadband speed at this moment is 15.63 Mbps (d) with 5.31 Mbps (u). That's a bit faster than usual, as it is usually just under 15 Mbps (d)
I live in Northampton and City Fibre were granted a £49m government contract to install fibre round the whole of our Northampton streets. Our own street was done and dusted a few months ago.
City Fibre have 'PartnershipTie-Ups' with certain broadband suppliers. City Fibre don't actually offer a broadband supply themselves - their partners do this. Apparently, their only Partner broadband provider for our area is Vodafone.
When CF had finished work, my name being on the list of 'interested parties', I was duly contacted by a Vodafone Salesman in August this year, who actually works out of our town centre shop. He convinced me, that despite FTTP not showing up as being possible from the "What Service is Available to your Address?" checker, that it was indeed possible for them to provide this updated service. The online checker was also updated to reflect this too. So I duly signed up for the Vodafone Gigafast supply, asking for 100Mbps and at a cost of £28.00 pm
I wasn't ever happy with the quality of confirmation e-mails from Vodafone. They only referred to the Delivery of the Router. A confirmation Monthly cost wasn't shown. Neither was the term, "Gigafast" mentioned for the broadband supply. The salesmanship and the professionalism of the deal on paper were utterly rubbish, IMHO.
I also realised, that by changing my ISP from BT to Vodafone, I would be missing out on:
BT Email (I have around 300 contacts); BT Cloud; BT NetProtect with McAfee's AV protection and would have to sign up with BT for a separate Premium E-Mail as a separate deal.
Having read some really bad local Vodafone Reviews on how flaky the Vodafone service was in surrounding local Northampton areas, I was disturbed and I duly cancelled the Vodafone Order.
BT's checker still shows me that BT cannot supply me with any kind of a 100Mbps broadband deal. A neighbour has recently been persuaded to update his BT Fibre 1 deal up to Fibre 2 "Halo" for more money than he was paying already, in an effort to try and increase his download speed. This is with a 24 month contract. He tells me he was getting around 14 Mbps and is now getting about 20 Mbps. Poor, eh?
In 18 years, I've never had a day's BT broadband failure yet. Therefore, think he's not signed up for too good a deal with his 24-month BT broadband supply contract. I can't see the point in Halo and think it is a weak offer from BT merely to get 24-month contracts signed up. But they do seem to be doing OK with it, don't they?
As an afterthought, it's overdue that I ring BT and renegotiate my own broadband contract price one again.
Lastly, if Vodafone says they can provide me with 100mbps broadband, I really do think BT should be able to do the same, but at the price they are extracting from me for a 15 Mbps supply, I can see why they don't want to sell me a Full Fibre FTTP deal at a much higher speed for a mere £23 pm.
I find it despicable, that you can't easily find out if you are an existing customer, what the actual BT broadband service costs are and how they hide from you whether you can get Full Fibre FTTP or FTTC or not, when they are quite happy not to sell you it and just keep pushing Fibre 1 and Fibre 2 deals with these 24-month contracts.
