Survey Claims 41 Percent of UK People Believe They Pay Too Much for Broadband
A new Attest survey that was conducted on behalf of full fibre broadband ISP Hyperoptic, which questioned 1,000 “nationally representative” UK adults during February 2026, has claimed that 41% of respondents believe they are paying more for their home internet connection than they should and 47% have never checked whether a better deal is available.
The survey, which should admittedly be viewed though Hyperoptic’s scope of vested interest and the potential unreliability of such a small sample size, goes on to claim that 51% of respondents pay £30 or more per month for broadband and only 19% pay £40 or more. But it also notes how 7% say they are currently out of contract with their existing provider.
The ISP estimates that households remaining out of contract could be paying £15-£17 more per month than necessary – equivalent to up to £190 per year – based, they say, on the typical differences between advertised in-contract and standard out-of-contract pricing across major providers (supportive figures were not provided for this).
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Lutfu Kitapci, CCO and MD of ISP at Hyperoptic, said:
“The introduction of One Touch Switch has made it significantly easier for customers to move provider, and we’re seeing meaningful engagement across the market. However, our research shows that a significant proportion of households still feel they are overpaying or are not reviewing their options. As switching friction reduces, transparency, reliability and fair pricing become even more important competitive differentiators.”
On the issue of “overpaying,” it’s important to remember that price alone isn’t the only deciding factor and consumers also tend to consider other aspects, such as service and support quality or value-added extras (some features may not be found on rivals). Suffice to say, if your current provider has continued to deliver a good service and the features you want, then you’re less likely to consider switching.
In addition, some smaller providers don’t play the same discount games as the big boys and often adopt the same pricing post-contract as they do for new users, which can make them seem more expensive initially. But over the long-term, the differences through consistent pricing will often narrow for loyal subscribers.
The survey sadly fails to establish how many consumers may have alternatively haggled for a lower price, or even been offered a lower price automatically, to stay with their existing ISP (Retentions – Tips for Cutting Your Broadband Bill). But your mileage from haggling will vary and not all providers do it (big providers are usually more receptive).
The end-of-contract notifications system arguably makes existing customers much more likely to try haggling, rather than switch, unless they’re unhappy with their ISP’s performance. Switching between providers has at least recently been made significantly quicker and easier, thanks to systems like One Touch Switching (OTS) on broadband or Text-to-Switch (Auto-Switch) on mobile (actual data shows 1.62 million fixed broadband and phone users switched between Sept 2024 and Sept 2025).
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Finally, those on state benefits (Universal Credit etc.) often also have the option of taking a cheaper Social Tariff – see our Quick Guide to UK Social Tariffs, which tend to start as low as £12 per month. Hyperoptic have some of the fastest social tariffs in the market, provided their network is available to your property (it claims to cover 1.9 million premises).
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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Only 41% – persumably the other 59% are living in cloud cuckoo land, or some of the latter percentage may have more money than sense. Apologies to Far2329Light, who is of the opinion we should all be paying more, by the recent comments made elsewhere.
You can get gigabit for less than £30 a month with a router. We were paying that 25 years ago for 1 MBit ADSL. So this actually seems really cheap to me. How much do you think it should be?
There are definitely people trapped in monopoly areas overpaying, especial VM, but I don’t think the sector as a whole is remotely overpriced and is highly competitive for most people.
Clearly no idea what it costs to run a retail ISP and provide even a moderately reliable broadband service. Very few providers are making a profit from broadband alone.
I pay £21.49 for 900 Mb/s symmetrical with a public static IP address. Don’t get me wrong, I’m always happy to pay less, but I’m not sure if further discounting would be financially sustainable for the provider?
I can remember paying £14 a month, or 1p minute for dial up.
I remember paying £50 a month for BT Highway when it launched,which gave you 2 ISDN channels you could bond to give you 128Kbps.
I remember initially paying Telewest £50 a month for their Blueyonder 512Kbps cable internet service when it launched.
I can remember Pipex kicking of the sub £30 price war for 2Mbps ADSL.
Now I pay that for 900Mbps FTTP and £16 for a mobile connection where I regularly see speeds higher than that.
You either have a short memory or know the price of everything and the value of nothing..
@It’s expensive: Some people are lucky enough to live in an Altnet area, where the pricing is reasonable. Don’t see firms like BT or Virgin Media going into bankruptcy anytime soon, with their £4 increase each April!
Look to other countries for an idea of what we should be paying. In France for example prices start at €23 (£20) a month for a 1Gbit symmetrical FTTH connection, available nationwide with no yearly price rises or “out of contract” price gouging.
Rational regulation that mandated the building of a single network with fair wholesale access for all ISPs resulted in France rolling out FTTH far sooner than the UK and at a much lower cost to the consumer.
In the UK poor government decisions have lead to a patchwork of broadband winners and losers with the country on average paying much more than comparable developed economies for a broadband connection.
@Ezra According to MSE search I can get Gigabit here for £23 monthly equivalent (i.e. factoring in price rises) over 18 months. The cheapest majors (VM and Vodafone) are £25 monthly equivalent. I don’t speak French so difficult for me to find the best deals but the cheapest I could find in France was through SFR at €28 euros or about £25 month, Orange was €30. I believe you when you say you can find it for €23 but let us not pretend there is some huge difference in price between the UK and France. The pricing is very similar.
@john_r I’m not talking about the headline price you might pay at sign up. I agree there are attractive deals, especially if you are a broadband “winner” with multiple competing networks in your area, but those prices don’t last.
According to the article almost 50% of people never shop around for a different ISP, so they eventually end up paying much more than the initial price at sign up.
You may say that’s on the consumer for not shopping around every time their contact ends. That is a position that ignores human nature, people have busy stressful lives and renegotiation of a broadband contract often ends up low down on a list of priorities.
I say the ISPs should not be able to exploit people in this manner.
In France the €23 deal I mentioned (with RED by SFR) is the price you pay, no minimum term, no yearly renegotiation, no cash back deal, no need to use a comparison site to even see the good deal, no other ridiculous hoops to jump through. The price may go up occasionally (it recently increased from €20, the first rise in 5 years) but there is no yearly above inflation rip off built into the contract.
That is what a broadband market regulated in the interests of the consumer looks like. What we have in the UK is pitiful in comparison.
RED is indeed cheap. It’s also nowhere near the quality people in the UK have come to expect. Some congested GPON networks, ‘up to’ speeds and half or less of maximum isn’t considered a fault.
https://communaute.red-by-sfr.fr/t5/R%C3%A9seau/Perte-de-d%C3%A9bit-ou-d%C3%A9bit-tr%C3%A8s-faible-RED-Box-Fibre-RED-by-SFR/td-p/463140
Looking at Orange the deal structure starts to look familiar with the introductory prices. Also subject to network congestion depending on who runs the local network, interconnection, etc.
https://boutique.orange.fr/internet/offres-fibre
@Ezra: Great reply post, 16/2/26 @12:17. The prices you have researched, albeit from another country, are something very few can obtain in the UK Broadband market. Just goes to prove consumers are in the main paying to much, from the big established providers contracts, especially when you consider the £4 extra each April.
Did a financially struggling provider which artificially subsidises its prices with debt and investment publish this? Oh.
Part of the problem is probably when broadband is bundled with other products – phone, mobile & TV (plus other utilities in some cases). I broke mine down when I left BT for Plusnet last year, it was a bit of a hassle but it’s done now & in future I will be keeping the broadband totally separate so I don’t have the problem again.
I guess you’ll never be signing up for Utility Warehouse then lmao
Correct
I believe part of the problem is ignorance regarding the required speed vs use.
For example I use the internet primarily for news, streaming, financial, and had to get by on substandard broadband for years.
However, updates for computers, phones, navigation equipment and other uses I decided 300Mbs was more than enough.
Speaking to one neighbour, all equipment uses wifi, two kids decide 1000mbs for them, really?
The other neighbour, web, email and streaming, went for the same speed as me, despite being advised 100Mbs would probably be sufficient.
Of course there is the other factor, boasting.
No. It’s 2026. We should have 1000/1000
, low latency and cheap fibre across the entire country as standard. It’s corporare profiteering that is the problem, not customers wanting a better and faster product.
Internet should have been treated as a utility, with one fibre cable being deployed to each home and shared access of it. Or better yet, bring Openreach under public control again and sell the products at cost rather than adding layers of investors on top.
@Lol
In an ideal world I agree, however the reluctance to implement FTTP in this country amazes me, when other so called third world countries have far superior services for years. This country seems to have wanted to struggle through every technology possible, dialup, isdn,asdl,vdsl,g-inp to be finally convinced fttp is the way forward.
Whats not helping is all these temporary first few month price nonsense, people see that as the proper price, and so anything at end of an offer period is overpriced.
We need to regulate a max price deviator so price differential between start and end of introductory price can be no more than something like 10%, instead of the mroe usual 200-300%.
Ban in contract rises, it would mean higher starting prices, but everything would be somewhat more honest, and steady, instead of a market of people constantly moving for introductory offers.
41% of what? I don’t recall doing a survey. Pretty sure I’ve lived in the UK all my life. I call bs, internet is way too expensive especially with the increases every year yet call centres based in India so they can pay less.
Hardly unexpected, ask anyone if they think they pay too much for anything particularly in the
land of the world champion complainers and moaners and you’re going to get people saying yes.
It’s a huge reason I left the UK completely for the Netherlands, I couldn’t take the negativity any longer, it infects every area of society.
Did the irony if moaning about excessive negativity escape you?
I was duped into paying £50 a month by Sky for their “Hyper fast 50mb, full fibre”, only to get it installed and only receive 20mb download on good days and I think 5mb upload, it took several complaints over a year to get them to downgrade me to a cheaper package as they kept citing the small print about how 20mb was the minimum they had to actually provide! But they kept promising that the work was coming to upgrade the internet!
We were stuck as the building we live in (a block of flats) has historically had bad internet service as your only option was to just find the cheapest service! When we eventually got our package dropped to the 30mb package we then only received 15mb download! So they have the capacity to get us closer but we’re restricting our line!
It was almost 3 years before an altnet was able to install on our building and we ended up switching to Lightning Fibre, we’re now paying less than we were with Sky but getting symmetrical 1Gbps up and down! I’ve only ever seen our internets download go as low as 990mb and it’s far more reliable than Sky’s ever was!
I’m sorry, but these big players are charging you a fortune simply to maintain an aging, decrepit network and couldn’t give a flying monkeys about the lies they tell us in order to get our money! I can’t count the number of times my Sky went offline without so much as an explanation or apology of any real kind in the 3 years we were with them, on one occasion it went off Friday and came back on the following Tuesday. With Sky claiming it was an issue on our end and not theirs for the first day!
But 2 years on with Lightning Fibre? 1 outage which lasted less than an hour and we were informed of a week before hand, reminded the day before, reminded the day of then informed when the service was back up and running with a link to report any issues which took you to a live chat WITH A PERSON! Not that I needed to as my internet actually performed as well as it always did.
I am one of those persons who are paying too much. Currently with a Aquiss paying £55 per month (900/115 Openreach)
Sky rang yesterday offering a much cheaper deal after having asked, how much I pay.
I said, I’m not interested in saving money on my broadband, and the agent was astonished.
Some things are worth saving money on, but for me broadband is not one of them. My partner and I are still working from home and Aquiss has been faultless for 4 years.
When I only need broadband for pleasure, then I’ll look at saving money.
I pay £73 to vodafone for 1600/120
I pay £52 to youfibre for 2000/2000
Youfibre sells people the same package for £34.99
Im not renewing either of them
It’s likely that a good few who feels it’s too expensive, pay for. Tariff that they don’t need. I see 300 mbit described as suitable for ‘light surfing’ and ‘up to 3 users’ which is nonsense. No wonder it feels expensive when it’s oversold.
Agreed.
There is a complete misunderstanding or at least general lack of understanding what speeds mean.
My mother, the sole user of the internet I. her house is demanding i upgrade her internet speed to half gigabit because her netflix buffers.
The real issue is the naff WiFi signal in her stone built house.
My plan is to hardwire it
@Dave, Thanks for taking us down memory lane, and letting us know many times big companies were able to get one over on you, fleeced comes to mind!
I think basic packages fibre 35 / 63 Mbps and full fibre 74/75 should be flat rate price of £20 with only £1 increase
Other plans they can stay the same
We only have one FTTP provider in my town. As the fibre to the cabinet was so patchy I was one of the first to get FTTP. The only problem is the inflation ++ annual increase contract that now means I’m paying upper £40s with no alternative anytime soon
There are a few issues for me…
Most people have no idea of the costs of running an ISP, yet want to pay less and get more while holding an opinion they pay too much.
I pay a quid at day for 900mbit, including equipment and a decent router as well as next day repairs and replacement if needed.
I think that’s great value.
People will always complain that everything is too expensive.
Water is a prime example. again I pay about a quid a day for ample clean water for my family of four, not only that for the same price they also collect the dirty water and the contents my toilet bowl and treat and dispose of it.
Personally I’m happy paying a quid a day for someone to take our turds away… How much would you want to go around and collect turds and wrangle them into something less offensive?
But yet people bellyache about water prices, the go and spend a quid on a bottle of water.