BT in Early Black Friday Sale for FTTC, FTTP Broadband and TV Sports
It’s that time of the year again, when UK ISPs get in on the Black Friday action by offering all sorts of discounts to new customers. Kicking off the event a bit early today is BT, which has cut their unlimited 50Mbps (average) “Superfast Fibre” (FTTC/P) and phone package to just £29.99 per month, but there’s more.
On top of that the provider is also offering new or existing Sky TV customers the ability to add their BTSport TV channel content at half price (£6 a month) for 18 months. Meanwhile customers taking out a BTMobile contract on some of the top handsets, including the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S9, iPhone 7 and iPhone 8, can get DOUBLE data for the duration of their contract and enjoy half price costs for the first six months.
In addition, BT also has further deals across their various broadband, TV and BTSport services to take advantage of this Black Friday, although being ISPreview.co.uk we’ve only chosen to summarise their current broadband deals below. All of the operator’s Black Friday deals will run for 10 days from 16th November until the 26th November.
As usual each package comes attached to an 18 month contract term, phone line rental with free “unlimited” UK weekend calls, unlimited data usage, a wireless router (Smart Hub), Cloud storage (200GB+), Virus Protect, Parental Controls, Call Protect (stops nuisance calls), free access to BT’s national network of WiFi hotspots and SmartTalk (voice calls over Wi-Fi/4G).
We also note that they’ve discounted their top 145Mbps and 300Mbps capable FTTP and G.fast based ultrafast broadband packages, which we think is a first.
Broadband (ADSL)
Average Download of 10Mbps
£70 Reward Card
Setup Fee: £19.99Price: £24.99 a month for 18 months (£45.49 thereafter)
Superfast Fibre Essential
Average Download of 36Mbps
£80 Reward Card
Setup Fee: £9.99Price: £28.99 a month for 18 months (£44.49 thereafter)
Superfast Fibre
Average Download of 50Mbps
£120 Reward Card
Setup Fee: £9.99Price: £29.99 a month for 18 months (£52.49 thereafter)
Superfast Fibre 2
Average Download of 67Mbps
£140 Reward Card
Setup Fee: £9.99Price: £39.99 a month for 18 months (£58.99 thereafter)
Superfast Fibre Plus
Average Download of 67Mbps
Special benefits for Mobile customers
Setup Fee: £9.99Price: £54.99 a month for 18 months (£58.99 thereafter)
Superfast Fibre 3 Plus (FTTP / G.fast)
Average Download of 145Mbps
Special benefits for Mobile customers
£150 Reward Card
Setup Fee: £9.99Price: £44.99 a month for 18 months (£59.99 thereafter)
Superfast Fibre 4 Plus (FTTP / G.fast)
Average Download of 300Mbps
Special benefits for Mobile customers
£150 Reward Card
Setup Fee: £9.99Price: £49.99 a month for 18 months (£64.99 thereafter)
Keith is a computer engineer and website developer from Dorset (England) who also assists, on a part-time basis, in the general upkeep of ISPreview.co.uk's systems and services. He also writes the occasional editorial and special offer article. Find me on Contacts.
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The Fibre 3 Plus and 4 Plus packages were £54.99 and £59.99 yesterday so the price was already £5 below non minimum contract price.
Better value now at £15 less of course.
Lovely to see they are now dropping the prices to get people on board – and not bothering to give it to he rest of us. Luckily I am sure VM will soon up their speed etc when they start to lose customers for the upload. And then unlike BT all VM customers will benefit.
Looking forward to it.
It’s only upload that we lack – everything else is far superior.
http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest/41893784
@simon
I cannot get VM where I live – so let’s complain about that eh?
And I live in a major urban area which has zero VM clients within the unitary authority boundaries.
A massive market which is totally ignored by VM.
See how pointless these arguments are.
Well no – it’s likely to be your council stopping vm – they are installing their internet to places in my town this week! so its clearly not VM who don’t want to go there.
But as I said – when VM do something the whole country benefits – something BT should have learnt by by now
@Simon
“when VM do something the whole country benefits”
VM only cover about 55% of the country so how do the other 45% benefit?
I’m confused…….
Sorry Simon but as I’ve shown VM never benefits the whole country. It only reaches 50% of the country and ignores whole areas where it cannot be bothered.
And no VM isn’t blocked by the council here, they just don’t want to spend the money to cover a whole area.
Indeed BT is the only national provider and it benefits every one as it charges the same flat fees for its service regardless of geography.
“Indeed BT is the only national provider and it benefits every one…”
A pity the “The Fibre 3 Plus and 4 Plus packages” you were so keen to pimp for your company in your opening post do not benefit everyone but currently only around 10% of the country. Less if we are talking FTTP for and not G.Fast.
@joseph
I’m not pimping anything and I have NO COMPANY.
I was talking to the author of this piece who stated that the discounts “which we think is a first.”
I was just pointing out to the author that it wasn’t the first time.
So I don’t understand why I am being trolled (by you and others) for informing the author that the article seems to be incorrect.
YOU highlighted 2 “ULTRA” fast BT products.
YOU then went on to discuss with another USER about Virgins coverage accusing them of “50% coverage” because they “cannot be bothered”
I pointed out the ULTRA fast products from BT that you mentioned cover even less of the country.
Nobody is trolling you. You started the debate about ULTRAFAST products and then engaged in a debate about COVERAGE from 2 providers. If you do not want to talk about such things perhaps you should not mention them to begin with.
Virgin reach more of the country with ULTRA fast products then BT. If you have no affiliation and i apologise if you do not, with either company then discussing the FACTS about speeds and coverage should not be of any concern.
Well said if someone wishes to talk about 100 Mb and faster products and then call out coverage figures lets indeed have the full facts.
Well this is then amplified by the upload battle between the symmetrical Alt Nets and asymmetric OR.
In the upload battle VM are at the bottom of the pile and I suspect this may turn into a majority negative differentiator.
Quite amusing really after the comments related to Hyperopic dropped their prices too the other day…….
The only package BT beat VM significantly on with regards to upload is the 300Mb FTTP/G.Fast package which has 50Mb upload, the 145Mb FTTP/G.Fast package is 30Mb upload. If you are taking any and it is delivered via G.Fast you probably are not going to get either of those “UP TO” figures.
Price is the biggest factor (i personally do not look at short term offers but what it will cost long term from any provider but for comparison ill look at both).
Lets take the top package from both, IE BT 300Mb Vs VM 350Mb…
Special offer prices are BT £49.99 Vs Virgin at £42 (8 quid difference over 18 months equals virgin being £144 cheaper).
Personally for a slower upload of 21Mb vs BT 50Mb i consider £144 saving more than worth it especially when you are likely going to get a faster download from the cheaper provider.
After contract period prices BT is £64.99 Vs Virgin at £57 (or basically still £8 quid a month cheaper).
As to who benefits, i like you at first thought what is Simon on about. I then re-read the thread and think he was arguing that the BT 145Mb and 300Mb packages that Occasionally Factual was so keen to highlight compared to VM 350Mb package is only available to a small fraction of the country (something like 680,000 which have FTTP and around 2 Million {or whatever its reached now} available for G.Fast, either way less than 10% of premises in this country coverage).
@joseph
I do have two Gfast packages at different locations.
Both of them are nominal 330/50
There reality is that one of them delivers about 290/49 very reliably over a 140m line.
And the other delivers 240/48 less reliably but that is down to the state of the overhead copper over about 175 meter line.
And VM can’t crow too much about the state of some of their copper as the VM service we are stuck with at one of our other sites is absolutely dreadful in terms of reliability.
Pretty much what i said about “UP TO” figure then. Your upload does better than i thought it would on both lines though which is nice.
Shame about the 2nd line and it only running at around 70% of its theoretical download “upto” speed. In a situation like that it becomes (IMO of course) even harder to justify the cost.
I personally would at that point (assuming a person had the choice) unless i really, really needed the 48Mb upload you are getting go for a 200Mb VM package (after contract prices) would be BT £65 VS Virgin at £52 a massive IMO £13 saving per month. (its similar saving during the special offers phase from both BT £50 VM £37).
Sure the upload on that VM is only 12Mb but most home users i doubt would need more (though some will claim here till they are blue in the face they do). If you or anyone was a business i can kind of understand faster the better for both down and upload, but at that point if it is that important we need to start looking at NON-residential packages.
Reliability and condition of the copper or any cabling can not really be debated either positively or negatively IMO for BT or VM. Quality/condition of cable will vary for both providers. What it is like in your area or mine for either provider will be different for others in different areas.
@Joseph
“but at that point if it is that important we need to start looking at NON-residential packages.”
The business package is great for 9-5’ers but as recently confirmed to me – it’s rate limited and volume limited from 6pm-8am (12.5GB down -3.5GB per day and up at half the speed – so really is useless for anyone on a home business setup – in that case I think it’s fair to say res can be allowed.
If you do too much outside of business hours – its permanently dampened down outside of those – all as confirmed in chat and on the phone to me – by 3 different agents. I was mid switch when I was told this – and I cancelled as a result. My service runs so well no way am I going to mess with it
Good value if you work in the day and need it – otherwise not so good
They do higher packages then that, including 300Mb up and down. Obviously though you will no longer be in the realm off sub £100 a month for a service then.
BT and VM when it comes to higher class connections (dedicated lines and similar) are more what i was talking about. Costs ramp up considerably, but so does what you get, if speed and reliability are a must. Then options like that are available from both again though one is considerably cheaper than the other 😉
The Voom business services are not rate limited. STM, the usage based rate limiting, has never been active on the Voom services and was deactivated on the residential services on download a while ago and on upload earlier this year.
I’m not sure how you were in mid-switch given you took on 24 month contract this year. An ouchy contract pay out but either way there is definitely no shaping or rate limiting active on Voom.
I remind you, Simon, you claimed on here to have taken the Voom Broadband + mobile deal very close to its release. The contact on this would’ve been between 12 and 24 months.
There is definitely no throttling, shaping or limits on Voom – as you would know if you’d actually been using it like you claimed to be.
@josheph
“Sure the upload on that VM is only 12Mb but most home users i doubt would need more……If you or anyone was a business i can kind of understand faster the better for both down and upload…”
This is for business use and we mainly saturate the upload backing things up and streaming lots of channels of high res CCTV so we can monitor what is going on.
“Reliability and condition of the copper or any cabling can not really be debated either positively or negatively IMO for BT or VM. Quality/condition of cable will vary for both providers. What it is like in your area or mine for either provider will be different for others in different areas.”
As I said I have one dud VM and one dud OR copper connection. So I don’t think either organisation can start throwing stones on that basis
Yep I can understand needing faster speeds if its business use. Your use case is interesting. I assume you are uploading large videos to a cloud service of some description. Without going into too much detail and totally derailing this news item. Have you looked into a onsite solution for backing up the CCTV or if it is an additional offsite backup that you do consider a new/additional encoding box for the gear that will record and store it in X/H.265 format. It may be an additional cost but it could save you considerable time, bandwidth and money in the long run. Especially if the CCTV records in older MPEG2 format.
I also agree about VM and BT, condition of cables and service will vary area to area for both providers.
Well you cant do much of that on 20mbps – I have 4 4K cameras and they take it up when I access remotely – but also why stream? If it’s off site fair enough but if not then it’s done through the router and dosen’t use any bandwidth.
If you have a decent CCTV system when you access it remotely it will allow a lower bandwidth stream. Most even home use systems allow you to set a primary and a alternative stream and the bitrate for both accordingly. You would need nothing like 20 Mb upload.
VM’s 20Mb upload has been such an issue for me at times in this office that we offload upload to LTE for certain applications.
I have raised this at the highest levels with them and they are sorting it but, of course, as with any company of any size agility isn’t something they’re known for.
I suspect the only difference as its you Carl is you need it for more than just for cameras 😉 and is real work use which needs the upload.
Yes – as Carl is the only person doing business with upload.. what a stupid comment.
I upload 100’s of GB’s a month of videos and brochures – the average house video tour is over 65GB
However if we are to get faster upload then I would be up for that – whatever package or guise it came in.
@joseph
We are streaming at least 4 x 4K CCTV back to the office for live view. This is mostly to do with remote H&S policy monitoring and general site logicstics and has less to do with traditional security.
On top of that you have interactive BIM type data for CAD.
Then you have our bespoke online task management/safety/QA system that chews a fair amount of bandwidth with say 10 people using the system on any one site simultaneously.
We do have a NAS onsite with is recording the data but the live stream to a bank of large screen TV’s at heads office is essential.
The issue being that one you start to use a lot of the bandwidth 100% of the time the user experience degrades. And yes we have tried traffic prioritisation but we have found it better to pay for more bandwidth than messing around.
@CarlT
We too use LTE to boost our upstream capacity on sites where 20mb/s wont cut it.
Depending on amount of cameras an improved encoding device may help. 4x cameras even 4K itself should not be an issues unless they are all streaming in MPEG2 and/OR exceeding 10Mbps each (which would not only be pointless but ridiculous as a movie download in H264 or H265 from some services uses less than that). If the bitrate is the problem, check you do not have things set at a level which is just chewing bandwidth for bandwidth sake, and if its not consider upgrading to a H265 device where 2Mb per camera stream should be enough to give the same visually perceivable quality to that of older codecs. MPEG2 camera streams typically need/use 3-7Mb to look half decent (varies by that huge amount for really old analogue/early basic MPEG2 systems depending on camera sensor, age of system and more) MPEG4/H264 you can get away with 2-5Mb and a newer H265 system 3Mb should be more than enough… Anything more and it typically does not help with the “perceivable” picture quality even if the system allows you to set the bandwidth higher. Though once you get into the realms of 16+ cameras then no common 20,30 or 50Mb upload product is going to help. No matter what CCTV system you have.
To be honest judging by the amount of other use you need you would probably be better of with a dedicated line. As is evident by you still needing 2 lines with as near to it of 50Mb each to do the job.
Its frustrating really that in this day and age entry business products from BT and Virgin are basically the same as their residential products (in terms of speed anyway). Residential products and significantly lower upload speed i can understand as no residential use would be anything like your business use. A bit of a cheek that from both providers if you want/need considerably more then you have to go lease line or multi line.
@joseph
“A bit of a cheek that from both providers if you want/need considerably more then you have to go lease line or multi line.”
Yes that is the frustrating thing in the extreme. These are decent sized construction sites.
The Gfast connections (both of them at different locations) are actually fine on the upstream element.
We do have quiet a number of construction site on the go at any one time and we have ones that have 1G/1G from Hyper (one at the moment) one from CF and we get zero problems.
We have spent a lot of time and had a lot of good minds look at bandwidth management and it is the way it is. As we can buy a solution (in some but not all places) we do just that.
I think the streams are something like 4 x 6Mb/s so that chokes a FTTC connection. We have used two FTTC connections in the past, on some locations, one to do the CCTV and the other to do the data and that worked.
Any less bandwidth and things just stop working properly. From a business perspective I don’t care if it costs another £50 a month I just need the performance. Leased was (historically but it is changing) not really an option because of the time it takes to get the lines run in and the contract lengths were often too long.
What is really even more frustrating is one super prime location we are working on we can only get ADSL2+ no VM, no FTTC, no Gfast or FFTPoD and it is in a very nice bit of North West London where you would not doubt for a second that the residents could afford a good broad band package. So that location is totally on 4G with a nice big passive antenna to help things along.
Ho hum
But it’s okay as Joseph says we can pipe the quality down – and that really we shouldn’t be allowing 4x6mbps – or rather when I point that out I am mocked.
Seems Joseph dosen’t have a f’ing clue!
@A_builder
Sounds like they are likely H264 systems with the bitrate/quality set to either its highest level or one step down from the top. So can appreciate your frustration, may be worth trying a H265 system at some point which should reduced that bandwidth by 33-50%.
Thankfully unlike some i have seen at least your system is not/unlikely to be some old MPEG2 CCTV.
@Simon
I said no such thing about piping down quality a 6Mb stream would not be needed with a H265 system. The systems A-Builder is using is more than likely H264 based. If you had any idea about anything i had mentioned you like A_Builder would understand what was explained. You like him would also comprehend newer codecs equal less bandwidth required.
I suggest you just stick to your regular whinging you do on here rather than trying to engage in technical discussions. You sound like ADSLMax with his short mental fuse.
@Joseph
I think the take home from all of this is too much time can be wasted trying to optimised systems to work with inadequate connection bandwidth. And yes there are clever things to be done and work arounds all over the place. But at the end of the day a pure fibre connection just does the job out of the box.
Our frustration is that we cannot get proper connection in a lot of places we work even when we are prepared to pay a sensible rate for them. Having to run leased lines into construction sites is daft: we are not running a data centre. And mid level ProSumer level fibre connections are fine for all of our remote sites.
The net result of this is the usual British ‘tax’ on getting things done. I use the word ‘tax’ loosely but unfortunately wether you drive a goods vehicle or connect data there is a tax on getting things done in this country. It is also worth reflecting on the effect of the ‘tax’ on productivity flow and path length as the two things largely work against each other. Which is slightly counter intuitive but the costs of doing things in a singular linear manner is such that aggregation takes place to mitigate direct cost but the activity of aggregation increases net cost and increases net timescale.
Yes, it must be incredibly frustrating. As mentioned earlier i do not know why BT and VM still have low upload rates on their business packages (the residential ones i can understand). The only reason i can think BT do not offer 1:1 up and down like some altnets on their FTTH/P do must be purely down to still wanting a market for lease line sales.
VM i can kinda understand a little more as i doubt any of their “hybrid” fibre solutions could offer a 1:1 and the little full fibre they have is not really marketed as such/or a separate product (excluding their lease line stuff) they just sell it as their VIVID/VOOM.
Why BT have gone the route of offering 3 product ranges (FTTC, FTTH/P, G.Fast) when none of them really give a BIG advantage upload wise and only really a big advantage upload wise if you can get the 300Mb download package i do not know. Just different marketing i guess, hopefully in the next couple of years it will change, and the pricing for FTTH/P will be more inline with what some altnets charge, at the moment its not competitive in speed or price regards, or appealing to someone such as yourself that needs speed both ways.