GoCompare Claim 9.5 Million UK Homes Paying for Unneeded Broadband Speeds
A new survey from comparison site Go.Compare, which used data gathered from YouGov and other sources, has claimed that 34% of respondents (equated to 9.5 million households) are paying for broadband speeds “they don’t need“. This is said to be equal to an estimated £53m spent on “unused speeds” each month (or £637m a year).
According to the findings, the majority of Brits pay for some of the fastest broadband speeds. For example, 34% have speeds of over 150 Megabits per second (Mbps), but it’s estimated that just 21% of internet users actually need broadband as fast as this. Similarly, 27% pay for speeds between 51 and 100Mbps, but only 12% of internet users are said to need speeds in this range. Meanwhile, only 3% settle for the slowest speeds of 15Mbps or less, yet they claim this would be enough for 13% of users.
The comparison site suggests that those who overpay spend an average of £5.58 per month more than they need to on their broadband, which they claim means £66.96 is wasted over 12 months – enough to cover a streamer’s standard Netflix subscription for a year
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Meanwhile, users who only need 15Mbps also tend to overpay the most, as just 4% of these users said they pay for speeds around this level. One in 10 of these users stated that they pay for some of the fastest speeds at over 150Mbps – despite the slowest offerings being enough for their usage. As a result, they overspend by £9 per month, equating to £113 being wasted every year.
Need vs Demand is Complex
In order to estimate the number of Brits claimed to be overpaying for their broadband, the comparison site first identified the speeds needed by different groups of internet users using a YouGov survey. These groups were identified by asking respondents what they use their broadband for and the number of people in their household, then comparing their responses to the speeds required to meet these needs (sadly, we don’t get to see this data to check it for accuracy).
The site then asked each group what internet speeds they were actually paying for to identify how many respondents were overpaying for their broadband. This number was applied to the overall number of broadband users in the survey to estimate the percentage of broadband users overpaying. This percentage was then applied to the estimated number of UK households using broadband to estimate the number of households overpaying.
However, there are some problems with this approach, such as with the fact that most UK homes (over 85% of premises) are now within reach of a gigabit-capable broadband network and those often have entry-level speeds that start around the 100Mbps mark. Slower options are sometimes available (usually in non-FTTP areas), but the price difference is often small, while copper-based packages (e.g. FTTC, ADSL2+) aren’t always vastly cheaper.
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The other issue is that question of “need“. For example, most of the time I don’t strictly need a 500Mbps+ download or upload speed, but that changes the moment a big backup file needs to be transferred (daily) or a new video game is released – where being able to complete that task in seconds or minutes, rather than hours or days, has a lot of value to me.
So on paper you could get away with slower speeds, but the reality is often more complex and users don’t always feel that taking a faster speed than they strictly need is “overpaying“. Not to mention that faster connections are often delivered via more reliable and better-quality broadband technologies.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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“users who only need 15Mbps also tend to overpay the most, as just 4% of these users said they pay for speeds around this level”
Presumably they’re saying all low-volume users should move to ADSL. However, almost nobody sells ADSL any more. These days you’ll get FTTC 40/10 as a minimum (of course, it may not run that fast if you’re not close to the cabinet). Even then, most providers charge the same for 80/20 or 115/20 FTTP. And if they do sell ADSL, it will be at the same price.
So for these users, the chances of actually saving “£5.58 per month” by downgrading speed is pretty much zero.
I think they are right.
After my friends moved house they called Virgin Media and they suggested they take a 500Mbps package because they are both working from home. After we assessed their real bandwidth need they settled on a VDSL package for about the third of VMO2’s price. It was years ago and they still haven’t had any complaints about the speed (nor reliability).
In understand we here want the most bandwidth (and sometimes even use it) but for the majority of the people high bandwidth is rarely a bragging right and they are more interested in saving a few tenners.
Because the majority of people don’t need super-duper speed, they get told they do to make the ISP more money.
Look at what the majority of people use broadband for these days? Streaming video, maybe music, listening to podcasts or the radio. Maybe an audiobook. They connect their phones or tablets to it and they browse. They may have someone with a games console or even a gaming computer. But 100Mb/s is more than enough unless they have a 6 or more people in the house.
Talking about the average household, yeah there are some who may download and upload large files and have computers and laptops going and 4K streaming to a few TVs at the same time.
Higher speeds have some benefit. With buffering and microbursts.
And of course the lower latency of a fibre connection
The big con of pon provided by openreach means you could end up with low speeds as the fibre splits.
Where’s the altnets are providing p2p.
What? Most, if not all altnets are *PON.
When you hit the ISP network, you’ll be going through “a few fast pipes” anyway, and this is how ISPs have built their networks for years and years. Congestion at PON is unlikely unless you have a few very heavy users on the same split.
Or is this just a “bash BT” post just because? because you should include Cityfibre, nexfibre, netomnia/brsk, Fibre heroes etc. etc. too.
The whole release from GoCompare is dumb, because value for money isn’t taken into consideration as NE555 has stated above. Also people are generally clueless, so would likely “not need the speed” but would also complain / have kids complain when theres a game or patch to download for something they want to do “now”.
Gigaclear, actually kellys, engineer told me its a single fibre back to the cabinet per user
Actually you are correct my gigaclear connection at least is using xgs pon that doesn’t have the bandwidth limitations of earlier implementations.
Yes. Gigaclear do P2P, but they’re the odd one out rather than “the normal”. Also they’ve since changed tactic and newer areas are via PON (at least the last few years).
“The customer last mile services are delivered as fibre based Point-to-Point or
PON (Passive Optical Network) services offering 30Mbps to 1Gbps
symmetrically” taken from the “Gigaclear network information” page – I would link but I think it’d get caught in the comments.
Also FWIW, a “single fibre back to the cabinet” doesn’t really mean anything if they build their network the same was as PON (e.g. single fibres to each property, then aggregated back to a cabinet, then single fibre to a pop). “True” P2P would be fibre from CSP to the POP onto backhaul. Your pinch point in that scenario would just be the cabinet rather than the PON split.
Cityfibre also do single fibre back to the cabinet for every user.
In the cabinet is a PON splitter.
I have said this for a while, people are paying for speeds they don’t need. The problem is, even the lower speeds are not much cheaper. Look at EE for a start, full fibre 37Mb/s is £29.99, the next level up is 50Mb/s for £29.99. £31 for 74Mb.s and then back to £29.99 for 149Mb/s, don’t forget the price rises in that.
They do this because they hope people don’t decide to downgrade at the end of their contract.
Talk Talk is the same, £28 for 65mb.s and the same for 150Mb/s, they all do it, including the provider I am with, they gave me 500Mb/s for £24 a month, which was cheaper at the time than the lower speed, hoping that I did not downgrade and I have not, yet.
What is needed is a cheap slower speed service, something like 30Mb/s for £20, it is not going to happen, but would be ideal for a lot of people.
If Freely gets to be the main TV service in the U.K and replace Freeview, then a cheap basic broadband will be needed for these people who don’t have broadband, or maybe a free one just for Freely.
From what I have seen, the only provider that don’t have this sort of offers is now Broadband, their prices got from £24 for a 74Mb/s service and upwards. Which to be honest is not too bad, the same as I was paying for my FTTC service from Plusnet. The main problem is the mid-contract price rises and the 24 months that these providers are now pushing people into.
I had a look on money savings expert to see what the cheapest I could get if I was changing, and I found something called p[op telecom, £21 a month for 38Mb/s, 12-month contract full fibre, one stream 38Mb/s around the same price, 24 months contract. They have Vodafone 150Mb/s down as £20 Equivalent monthly cost, which seems a good deal until the prices start going up mid-contract .
These are all on Openreach network.
I know one of my brothers is thinking of using mobile network for his home broadband to keep down costs., but saying that he is retired now and is on pension credits, so he should be able to get social tarrif.
I would’ve thought the majority of the price is going to be the cost of providing the line in the first place. The cost difference to the ISP of provisioning 30 MBit or 100 MBit would be small.I imagine the profit premiums are in the higher speed line speeds not the lower ones.
@john , yep, that is the thing, the cost of building and keeping the network up and running is what a lot of our money goes to, plus wages. Very little goes to what we use.
Its the supermarket strategy
e.g. at a Supermarket I only need 50g, but there is no 50g product on sale, the 100g is £1.50, but I can then get 200g for £1.75, so I buy the 200g, as the 100g is a ripoff, but the 200g is actually too much and it is wasteful.
Same is happening with broadband, the lower speeds are only slighter cheaper than the speed above, the only speeds which have a big jump in price is usually the top halo product, with everything below it close in price.
If I can get 1gbit for 10% more than the cost of 160mbit, I am going to buy gigabit, simples. However in my own personal case, I do value the extra bandwidth and like how fast games download.
All this is largely now down to an obsession with minimal revenue per customer, the companies decide a minimal level they will sell a product at and as such lower spec’d products are inflated to maintain that revenue floor.
I am in all honestly upgraded from FTTC 80/20 to G.fast 160/30 then upgraded to G.fast 330/50 because I need the speed but at the end of the day my ISP was right I don’t need G.fast. Was fine on FTTC 80/20.
How about flipping the study round, and look at those paying a lot extra for slow broadband?
My parents are on a BT package that gives “up to 17mb” FTTC, and are paying for more for their service(one renewal option is £47!)than most people pay for 1Gb FTTP (£46?).
they live in the NR4 area of Norwich, so less than 3 miles from Norwich city centre, in a suburb without ALTNET’s other than DOCSIS based VM.
Ya know, you could also move them to someone like Vodafone or sky and pay about £20?
@ex-techie Sky isn’t much cheaper once any call packages and TNT sports discounts are taken into account, but this isn’t the point of my post.
paying more generally for a low speed FTTC connection, compared to a FTTP connection is.
E.G BT FTTP is advertised from £27pm, the cheapest FTTC is £36, something many are forced into.
Sky might well be cheaper, but still there is a disparity with their FTTP v FTTC prices (and then taking into account the terrible speeds some get on FTTC).
Clicking through I can see the categories take no account of burst requirement. For example it says that gamers only need a 50 MBit/s connection and are overpaying otherwise.They didn’t think to ask “How much extra would you be willing to pay to download a new game in 15 minutes instead of several hours?’. It’s a naive survey and the results can’t be taken seriously.
I’m with Vermin (for now) back in the day when I joined I took “256kb Broadband” today I’m on 350Mb which actually runs at about 440Mb all of the increases that get me to this figure have been free network speed upgrades applicable to all customers and free upgrades for renewing the contract for another term, do I need it, no of course not, did I ask for it – no, but as I was advised by a senior technician some years ago “the faster you go the cheaper it is, reading this article leads me to conclude he was not wrong.
” but it’s estimated that just 21% of internet users actually need broadband as fast as this.”
By whom???
We pay far too much for BB.
Yes and no.
I remember when ADSL first started, I was paying £40 a month for 512Kb/s, and all we had then was a modem and no routers or networks of sorts.
I had a lodger here at the time, so I had a sort of network so we could access the internet on our different computers. Using a computer in my bedroom to dial-up Internet connection sharing or what ever it was called. All I did was change the dial-up modem for the ADSL frog modem. I was lucky I had a mate who knew a bit about networking then, the co-ax thing with BNC and terminators.
Anyway, as I said £40 a month then, now I am paying less than that for 500Mb/s that I can use all around the house.
The difference between now and then is when I had ADSL, it was something I wanted, there was no real need for broadband or the internet then, apart from the few odd things. Now, it is difficult to live without it as so many things are online. so many people don’t have much of a choice.
How so?
An investor made a loan of about £1000 to get you connected. Allowing for inflation and the need of the investor to make a return, else they won’t lend it in the first place, how quickly will your £25 a month pay them back?
Of course, if you wanted to pay the £1k upfront you could have broadband for about £10 per month.
Most of the faster connections are cheaper or the same price as the slower ones! I was paying £32 a month for 150Mb when my ISP rang me out the blue offering me 900Mb for £25 a month with no price rises for the full 24 month contract. I don’t think he got to the end of the sentence before I was saying “Hell yes” – Although I’m not utilising it all of the time, it’s costing me £7 less than a slower connection was so it’s a definite win!
I pay for 1Gbps, not because I use it all of the time, of course not. But it’s about “getting stuff done quickly when needed”. If I buy a 120 GB game on Steam, I don’t want to wait half a day for it to download. Previously I had to run the downloads overnight on ADSL2. Purchase to play is in the order of 20 minutes now. Updating my Linux boxes, quick and speedy, no waiting around for 1 gig of packages to download, happens within moments. That’s the main reason in my case.
Exactly right , most dont need it. About time some proper market research was conducted
I think what’s going on here is more devious than most people realise. Once everyone is on high speeds then the price will really start to ramp up. (Someone has to pay back the investors, after all). When you then want to downgrade, because you don’t need that speed, you’ll find that you can’t because they don’t sell the slower speed any more. Checkmate, game over! The industry is rife with such sharp practice, for example, the imposition of two year contracts, so you can’t get out anytime soon should you want to.
I personally think the issue here is that you are looking at “speed” rather than product price-point. As tech advances, your new speed will trend towards your old speed in terms of price-point. In real terms, after considering years of inflation and advancement in tech, would you consider that you are paying more now for your (whatever it is) 80Meg, or 300Meg service than you were 25 years ago with your 512Kbps ADSL service?
My point is that as technology advances, your previous “speed” gets discontinued, which means you are now on a faster speed, at the same baseline price-point. It doesn’t mean you’re necessarily paying more, it just means the boundaries have shifted.
I don’t pay anything more now per month for a 1 gig service than I did 10 years ago for a 14 Meg service.
Just my opinion, might not be the case for everyone.
Had a squizz through most of the comments here and one thing has been missed by this article/study/conglomeration of skewed opinion.
No one has thought about the actual cost of maintaining the network itself. Engineer call outs to fix faulty connections, installation works, run maintenance on hardware in exchanges or cabinets. Where does the money come from the cover that? The sky-pixies that magically drop from the sky?
That money has to come from somewhere y’know! Also in some cases, it’s either an in-house engineer or it’s a 3rd party one who comes to do the job – you’re not trained on how to run maintenance or install a line are you? Remember the old advert: “you’re not going to split an atom because your friend Neil saw it on a video once, are you?”, it time people started to be realistic.
Remember when you used to moan about having to pay line rental at £20.00 so you could then have your broadband service at £20+ per month? You would complain about having to pay for something you didn’t need/require? Well that cost has now gone, and you’re left paying for just your internet service, and you’re still complaining about that? And about an article that come from a skewed bit of research that’s most likely asked people who want to pinch every penny
You mean we are overpaying for crap speeds £26 for 28mbps that’s a good deal isn’t it
The minimum now should be at least 61mbps as advertised on websites people getting Less should get discounts
You could use the argument for cars, too. Are you overpaying if you have a 2.0 instead of a 1.1? Well, that depends on if you spend your time on faster roads or in a city, but, what about the times when the city dweller takes to the motorway? It’s all about perceived value. Most of the time they may not need the 2.0, BUT they appreciate the value of having more power for when they do need it.
It’s the same with me. I went from 30 Mbps via FTTC, to gigabit with Virgin (Nexfibre). Most of the time 30 could get by, but the second my daughter visited and started downloading stuff on the PS5, my network would grind to a halt. As it happens, the gigabit speeds cost the same as my old provider that could only give me 30 Mbps so I’m no worse off.
Hmmm. A survey by a company that makes money from people switching services carries out a survey that says people are overpaying and recommends switching.
Reminds me of when I got stopped by a ‘research’ company and asked to answer some questions on behalf of a well known consumer magazine. They were obviously angling at proving supermarkets were unfair with confusing pricing.
The first question was something like “which of these represents better value in your weekly shop. 60p for 1 pint of milk, £1 for 2 pints of milk or £1.20 for 4 pints?”. I said 60p for 1 pint. Her next question was why I thought that. I think she was expecting me to say it was the cheapest. I pointed out that for me it was the right answer based on my shop – I don’t like milk and don’t use it so don’t buy it unless I have company over, in which case buying anything more was a waste & that I realised it was the most expensive per pint and could easily work out the price per pint of the others but it was still the best option for me. She promptly ended the survey saying in a round about way that she didn’t think the rest of the questions were for me.
Point is, these surveys are nearly always designed to get the desired response for the company. So GoCompare say most people are overpaying for speeds they don’t need. Based on whose definition? Everyone has different use cases. I don’t need 1Gbps but choose to pay for it because I’m fortunate enough that the price difference is negligible for me and I think it worth paying for because sometimes that speed bump is good to have and saves me a fair bit of time, which I value more than the extra cost.
My Mother, on the other hand, is also getting faster speeds than she needs at 100Mbps, she sends the odd email, buys things form M&S and watches iPlayer. Half that speed would be fine for her but while there are services out there offering her slower speeds they cost more than what she is paying or are with some tin-bit ISP who has questionable reliability and customer service – something she values.