Get Bargain Broadband Today!

Carphone Warehouse (LSE: CPW) announced a "free" broadband service this week for its TalkTalk landline service, which currently has 2.5 million customers. Although Carphone Warehouse has only around 75,000 broadband customers at present, its new offer is likely to provoke another round of price cuts among its bigger rivals.

Over the past year, connection speeds have soared, while the cost of high-speed internet access has tumbled, thanks to increased competition and falling wholesale prices. What's more, in a process known as local-loop unbundling, Carphone Warehouse is one of a number of firms which are installing their own equipment in BT's (LSE: BT.A) exchanges, which should enable it to reach seven-tenths (70%) of the UK population. Additionally, satellite broadcaster BSkyB (LSE: BSY) has plans to introduce a broadband service in the autumn, further adding to competitive pressures.

Furthermore, according to price-comparison service SimplySwitch, we Brits now spend more time surfing the Web (over 2½ hours per day) than we do watching television. Therefore, it's crucial to find the most cost-effective deal to suit your Internet usage.

Broadband offers a number of advantages over dial-up connections, including:

• An "always on" service which provides 24-hour access to the Internet and email;
• Much faster access speeds, typically ten to forty times faster than a standard 56k dial-up connection;
• The ability to make telephone calls while online (dial-up users must dial off before making voice calls); and
• In some cases, broadband can be cheaper than dial-up, thanks to shorter download times and no pay-as-you-go per-minute access charges.

Alas, the UK's biggest broadband providers, NTL/Telewest and BT (which provide just over half of the UK's ten million broadband connections) don't offer particularly competitive deals for broadband connections. However, with an increasing number of broadband providers, it's relatively simple to ditch and switch to a faster, cheaper service.

It's now possible to pay under £10 a month for an all-inclusive broadband deal. However, with hundreds of different packages available, finding the best tariff to suit your needs is far from easy. Indeed, most of the 70,000 people switching to broadband each week will end up paying too much for what may be an inferior service.

For example, research from the ADSLguide website shows that the first-year cost (including installation and set up charges, plus VAT) of a basic 512k broadband connection can vary from £10 a month to a whopping £99 a month. Hence, it's worth your while taking a little time to do some research based on your individual usage, so that you don't end up massively overpaying for your surfing!

For the record, I spend at least forty hours a week online, yet pay under £15 a month for my metered 8Mbps service (plus £1.50 for each extra gigabyte over my 2GB monthly allowance) from Prodigy Networks. Can you find a better deal than this?

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