New full-fibre rival Gigaclear offers fast broadband speeds at £25 less than Virgin Media
LOOKING TO upgrade your broadband speeds, but want to pay a fraction of the monthly costs required by Virgin Media and BT Broadband to boost your download speeds?
Full-fibre broadband supplier Gigaclear has slashed the cost of its speedy 100Mbps download package to £19 a month. Better yet, since this is a full-fibre connection that broadband speed is symmetric, which means you'll enjoy upload speeds of 100Mbps too. That's ideal for anyone who spends a lot of time collaborating on documents, making video calls, backing up photos and data, or publishing videos and other large files.
The latest deal from Gigaclear only lasts for the first 18-months of your contract. After that, you'll be switched to £44 a month, unless you decide to switch to a new deal or move to a different provider. For comparison, Virgin Media's M100 bundle, which offers the same 100Mbps download speeds, will cost you £44 a month from the outset. BT doesn't offer a like-for-like option with its broadband bundles, but its Full Fibre 100 package (that, confusingly, actually offers speeds up to 150Mbps) costs £34.99 a month as part of a new promotion (with the first three months available at half that cost). At the end of your contract, that price rises to £39.99.
In other words, if you can bag those speeds from Gigaclear at less than £20 a month – don't hesitate.
Unfortunately, unlocking that deal might be a little tougher than you might expect. Gigaclear is one of a series of new full-fibre broadband providers that have sprung up in recent years. As Boris Johnson's Government pushes ahead to ensure that at least 85 percent of all UK premises have access to gigabit-broadband by 2025, a number of new providers have emerged to roll-out the next-generation connections.
Household brands like BT and Virgin Media are forging ahead with widespread upgrades to their own networks, with both forecast to connect 5.5 million and 15 million by the end of the year, respectively.
Gigaclear is currently only available in some 240,000 homes around England, so it's pretty unlikely that it's already in your street. However, the plucky full-fibre supplier has some lofty ambitions. It hopes to reach half a million properties by the end of 2023.
Unlike Virgin Media and BT Broadband, Gigaclear offers free installation with all of its broadband bundles. It also arrives with a wireless router and unlimited download allowance, which are both pretty standard.
But don't worry if you can't get the latest full-fibre deal from Gigaclear, there are some brilliant other broadband deals around right now. Companies are slashing prices and offering freebies in the run-up to Black Friday. Express.co.uk has compiled a complete list of the best broadband deals below...