Pay As You Go Broadband

Just what is PAYG broadband?

Well lets break that down into parts. PAYG and broadband. We’ll cover broadband first – it is easier.

Broadband

Broadband is the provision of broadband services via your home telephone (e.g. BT), home cable (e.g.Virgin Media) or mobile broadband dongle (e.g. vodafone). The term broadband is actual hard to define (different companies have different descriptions of fast internet services) but is intended to enable you to access the world-wide-web at considerably faster speeds than you would have had if you used to use ‘dial-up internet’. In the UK, broadband speeds are often advertised as ‘up to 8mb’ – that is the speed you access the internet per second. 8mb is actually pretty fast and sadly you are unlikely to get anywhere near those broadband speeds in the UK.

The speed of your broadband connection is effected by a number of factors internal to your household but also, the broadband provider (or internet service provider) effects the speed through the amount of capacity a telephone line has and the number of people in your area using broadband – this is known as the contention ratio.

In the case of mobile broadband, speeds are much more effected by the technology of the mobile infrastructure. Mobile broadband speeds are continuously being improved, but are still pretty slow compared to the broadband speeds you can get at home through your telephone line or cable (for cable TV customers).

PAYG (pay as you go)

Is a simple reduction of the phrase “Pay as you go” (see the definition for payg mobile phone on wikipedia – it was a term coined by the mobile phone industry) – much hyped by the mobile industry as a way to sell mobile phones outside of a 12-month contract. The idea is that you pay for a service as you use it. What the providers don’t tell you directly is that you pay significantly more for a product by having the flexibility of occasional use, as you do by taking out a low value contract.

Moreover, the pay-as-you-go concept goes that you need to pre-credit an account before you use the actual credit. In other words you give them £10 in advance of services you go on to use. If you don’t round to using all your PAYG credit then the provider makes a profit on the outstanding credit.

PAYG small-print – Check the small print with pay as you go providers, because, even though you pay for credit to go onto an account and would therefore understand it to be there “for ever” the cheeky companies will sometimes put in a clause to say that any remaining credit not used after a 30-day period is lost.

PAYG broadband

Lets combine these elements together. So – PAYG broadband – is broadband that you pay for as you use it. Unlike all the other utilities a house-hold buys, there are no standing charges. Instead, you pay for a service before you use it.

Think of it as a bit like pre-paid electricity cards – you pay your money, get a chit and use the service for as long as there is credit remaining. This is great if you do not want to make a long-term commitment (or contract) to a utility provider, including broaband.

If you do not want to go through the expense of a BT installation fee and susequent 12-month phone contract, before, you subscribe to a broadband provider, consider using a mobile pay-as-you-go broadband provider – the options available to you in the UK broadband market are – Orange, Three, Vodafone, o2, T-mobile.