The Best UK Broadband and Mobile Providers for Haggling Named

A new survey of around 6,500 respondents has revealed that most UK consumers who haggled for a lower price with one of the largest fixed line broadband ISPs or mobile network operators were successful in saving money. Sky Broadband (Sky TV) appeared to be the most likely to give a discount.

It’s of course no secret that bit of haggling could save you a lot of money, although one survey from last year suggested that only around 10% of consumers do this (here). Generally if you’re happy with the service then negotiation should be your first port of call before switching, unless the ISP doesn’t traditionally offer big discounts to new customers (like a lot of smaller ISPs) as they may be less open to this sort of approach.

Otherwise the best time to haggle is usually around the end of your contract or following a price hike and you can find some helpful advice for doing this in our Retentions Tips article. On top of that a new consumer survey from MSE has provided a useful indication of which providers might be more amenable to such an approach.

Apparently TalkTalk and Vodafone both dropped out of this year’s table, which in TalkTalk’s case might be partly because they’ve made it a lot easier for existing customers to re-contract back onto one of their Fixed Price Plans (i.e. these are available to both their new and existing customers). Sadly MSE doesn’t publish a more extensive list (limited sample size) of providers.

We should point out that not all ISPs are the same. Some adopt fairly standard pricing and avoid discounts, which means that haggling won’t get you very far because both new and existing customers will already be paying the same. However most consumers tend to use larger providers, where first year style discounting is much more common and this can result in a wide cost difference between new and old subscribers.