Gigabit and 1Gb Broadband Deals

Be honest about your house. A 4K Netflix stream needs about 15Mbps, so a gigabit line could carry more than sixty at once. Most homes never come close. Most homes are comfortably served by 100 to 300Mbps, and the speed your household actually needs usually lands well short of four figures.

The case for gigabit is many heavy things happening at once. Several 4K streams on different screens, big files moving constantly, cloud backups, someone uploading video or design work all day. If that's your home, gigabit removes the ceiling and you will feel it. If it isn't, a mid-range fibre deal covers everything you do for less money, and the gigabit line spends its life idling like a supercar in the school run queue.

Two gigabit deals can match on download and be very different machines underneath. Virgin's Gig1 runs on its cable network: the download averages around 1,130Mbps but the upload averages about 104Mbps. Full fibre gigabit behaves differently depending on whose network it rides. Openreach-based plans are usually asymmetric too, around 900Mbps down and 110Mbps up. Many altnets, including Hyperoptic, Community Fibre and most CityFibre providers, sell symmetric gigabit, so uploads match downloads.

For downloading and streaming, none of this matters. For anyone who works from home, sits on video calls all day, backs up to the cloud or pushes large files around, it matters a great deal. The connection type underneath the headline number is the single best tiebreaker between two gigabit deals, and upload is where it shows.

Around 9 in 10 UK homes can now get gigabit-capable broadband, according to Ofcom's latest figures. That figure is three networks stacked together: Openreach full fibre across much of the country, Virgin's cable in most large towns and cities and the altnets filling gaps everywhere from city tower blocks to rural villages. The quickest check is a postcode search, here or on Ofcom's broadband checker, because availability is decided street by street. If a gigabit isn't enough, some networks now sell 2Gbps and faster tiers, though those are even harder to justify than the first thousand.

A gigabit line is only gigabit at the router. Wifi sheds speed with every wall and every metre, and older wifi kit won't carry a full gigabit even with the laptop sat right next to it. Plenty of devices cap out below 1Gbps anyway, and no single phone or telly needs anything like it. To see the headline number you want an ethernet cable and modern wifi 6 or wifi 7 kit. Otherwise you are paying for a line that arrives at your sofa as 300Mbps, which is fine, because 300Mbps was probably all you needed in the first place.

The list starts with best value: the deals that cost least over the first year once intro prices, setup fees and gifts are counted. Upload speed doesn't change the order, so if you work from home or send big files, open a deal to check its upload before you choose. You can also sort by the cheapest monthly price or the fastest speed.