Michelle Minshall – Broadband Case Study

“We now have between 500 & 900mbps download & between 100 & 200mbps upload. I’m not exaggerating to say this has been life changing for us as a family.”

Can you give a summary of how life was like with poor broadband speeds?

It was incredibly difficult to function as a family of 5 with such poor broadband speeds. I do work from home occasionally and it was nigh on impossible at certain times of the day to make the online submissions I needed to make.

In school holidays, I would have to ask my children to take it in turns to stream / use games consoles as all 3 could not do it at once. I could never work from home in school holidays as I could not access anything if the children were all doing the same.

We had to pay more for a 3G router as it was our only option as a standard router gave us terrible speeds.  Even the 3G router wasn’t great but it was better than a standard router. We have sky Q which would often go down. Netflix could only be accessed when all 3 children were in bed and not using the broadband, Apple TV was a pipedream.

We have built our own home & a lot of the tech in the new house requires wifi (CCTV, alarm, music system, even the oven, dishwasher and coffee machine).  When this was wired in, we were told that it would simply just not work until we had decent broadband speeds.

What have your speeds gone from and to post upgrade?

We regularly had between 3 & 10mbps download speed & between 1.5 & 5mbps upload speed, it was honestly abysmal.

We now have between 500 & 900mbps download & between 100 & 200mbps upload. I’m not exaggerating to say this has been life changing for us as a family.

What are the key benefits of ultrafast broadband for your household?

Being able to work from home in the evenings and during school holidays has been transformational. All 5 of us being able to use devices at the same time, doing our own thing.

In addition, being able to watch Ted Lasso on Apple TV – it buffered every time we tried to use Apple TV with standard mobile broadband – but not anymore!

How would you describe your newly installed broadband?

Fab! It has a great reach, it has remained pretty consistent, haven’t noticed any ‘drop outs’.

Happy kids truly equals happy parents so it’s a WIN:WIN!

Would you encourage other residents to upgrade to ultrafast broadband once it’s readily available to them?

Absolutely!

We went for the best package available as we have children and we need it for work – we are more than happy with the price and benefits of the package we have but we also have retired neighbours who have taken out the lowest speed package, which is really reasonable in price, not too dissimilar to a standard broadband package. They are overjoyed with their speeds also.