Compare Australia's Best Broadband Plans

Compare Cheap Broadband Plans

Broadband can be a big extra expense in your monthly budget, but it doesn't have to break the bank.

There are some fantastic deals available on cheap broadband plans so that you can afford to get online at home and enjoy the benefits of broadband internet.

To make your life easy, we've found the 20 best cheap broadband plans and put them in the comparison table below so that you can easily compare the features that are most important to you

Cheap Broadband Internet Deals

When you’re looking for cheap broadband you’ll need to know what to look for. You don’t want to be caught out by usage restrictions or over limit fees that can sour the sweetest of plans.

There are plenty of broadband offers out there so let’s look at how to choose the best one that will suit your needs.

What Should I Be Looking for?

In the first place you should make sure you’ve got all your needs covered. This means thinking about what you want from your Internet plan by trying to gauge the following things:

• How many hours a day you surf the net.
• How many e-mails you send and receive.
• How many hours you listen to online radio.
• How many hours you spend playing online games.
• How many music tracks you download each day.
• How many movies you download each day.
• How many hours of Internet phone calls would you make each day.

Once you have answered these questions you can begin to look for plans that suit your usage pattern. It is most important that you do not underestimate your needs, but be realistic at the same time. There’s no point signing up to a plan and paying more than you have to, and conversely you’ll be frustrated if you run out of bandwidth before the month is up.

What Traps Should I Avoid?

As with any contract there is always the fine print. As far as broadband deals go you need to look out for the sting in the tail if you go over your data limit. With some plans you will have to pay a premium rate for all data that is in excess of your planned limit, or alternatively, your download speed will be throttled back to a relative snail’s pace. This is the most common cause of disappointment, so make sure you know what the limits are and what the costs will be.

Here is a summary of things you should look out for including extra charges that your service provider might be adding on:

• Line activation charges.
• Monthly telephone rental.
• Small monthly download quotas.
• Off-peak times with different download quotas.
• Length of contract.
• Modem costs.
• Speed you can expect after download limit reached.

Naturally one of the most important things you will be looking for is the expected speed of your Internet downloads. The speed that is quoted by your provider will probably be the maximum that can be expected. But it will probably be less than this because of local conditions in your area. Things like line interference and congestion can cause speeds to be lower than expected. So do not be tempted to choose a provider purely on the basis of the speed they advertise.

After you have done your initial analysis of your requirements you are in an excellent position to choose a plan that will suit you. As we have outlined above, you should check all the fine print and make sure you have covered any extra costs and satisfy yourself that you have adequate speed and data download limits.

Cheap broadband is not always best broadband, but it might just suit you.