How Much Does 1Gbps UK Home Broadband Cost – 2021 vs 2022

The list also excludes gigabit plans that cost more than £100 per month – partly to keep our workload down and also because £100+ is moving into business level pricing, as well as plans where the ISP is unclear about who is building their underlying network(s). We’ll also skip ISPs that harness more than two underlying networks (each with different prices) as this causes too much repetition and complexity for us to reflect below.

Overall, this list isn’t intended to be exhaustive, but it should help to illustrate common trends and changes over time. At present the only truly mass-market gigabit provider is Virgin Media, which is available to nearly 16 million premises. Openreach are some way behind that (over 6.44 million premises passed) and then there are the many smaller, albeit rapidly growing, AltNets.

In order to save space, we aren’t listing upload speeds. However, it’s worth noting that while many providers will give you symmetric uploads, a few often offer much slower uploads (e.g. Openreach-based networks, as well as Virgin and Broadway Broadband etc.). On most gigabit (1Gbps) plans this will still be 100Mbps+, which is more than enough for the majority of people, except on Virgin where they only offer uploads of 50Mbps.

Summary of UK 1Gbps Home Broadband Plans (Alphabetic)

Out of the 41 providers listed, only a couple saw a partial price increase – Vodafone and Zen Internet (we’ll come back to them later), while the rest either saw a significant price reduction or kept their prices unchanged. Speaking in real terms, prices that don’t change in this climate could also be considered as a reduction, due to the impact of inflation (CPI/RPI ballooned in the last half of 2021).

ISP Specific Observations

➤ Leetline and No One (Trunk Networks) – Last year’s pricing reflected just their Openreach based products, but they’ve both since added CityFibre packages too and at a lower price.

➤ Telcom (WeFibre) – The website for this provider is light on detail, and thus we’re unsure of the contract term for their £20 price point or whether that increases post-contract etc.

➤ Vodafone – In the original article they adopted the same pricing for both their Openreach and CityFibre based packages, while this year they’ve split them. In other words, Vodafone now charges less for their CityFibre packages than last year, but more for their Openreach plans – this makes sense because they now have many more CF ISPs to compete with than last year.

➤ Zen Internet – Zen’s CityFibre price in 2021 was a special launch offer that has since ended (going from £40 to £47.99), while their comparable Openreach based package has actually reduced in price.

Quite a few providers have also changed their minimum contract terms compared with last year. For example, Hyperoptic added 24-month contracts, whereas previously they only went up to 12-months (still an option). Similarly, KCOM adopted 18-months (up from 12 last year) and Lothian Broadband moved from an 18 to 12-month term. But the biggest change came from WightFibre, which scrapped their 24-month term for a rolling monthly contract.

One other thing worth noting is that BT and sibling EE are both continuing to be very competitive on price with rivals on the same Openreach platform. Admittedly, this list doesn’t include all the Openreach based FTTP providers that have launched gigabit plans since last year (there are quite a few), but generally BT remain well positioned against most – if not all – of those too.

Broadly speaking, most full fibre providers have become cheaper than they were last year (or at least not more expensive), which is likely to be a direct or indirect result of rising competition at the infrastructure level. But there are limits to how far such ISPs can reduce their prices, since making the service too cheap risks harming the investment model for deployment (i.e. pushing the long payback window even further out).

Some people may view these packages as expensive but, given the speed (not so long ago you’d be paying the same for an 80Mbps FTTC tier), most of them are actually remarkably cheap for what you’re getting. Admittedly, you might be able to find cheaper packages in other countries, but then the UK continues to trail most of Europe for FTTP coverage and thus our domestic market is still a long way from being fully developed.

At this point it’s worth remembering that the vast majority of consumers today would struggle to fully harness a 1Gbps connection. Slow WiFi, general hardware restrictions and the performance limitations of various internet services (servers) mean that maxing out 1Gbps is still difficult to do at home (here). Despite this, data demands never stop rising, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to have this kind of speed at your disposal.

Thankfully pretty much all the aforementioned providers also offer cheaper 100Mbps+ class packages, except those rare and wonderful exceptions like B4RN and toob, where 1Gbps is both extremely cheap and their only tier. Only a very few providers (e.g. CommunityFibre, B4RN and Zzoomm) currently offer faster plans than 1Gbps to homes and they’re usually into the £100+ level.