Switch ISP - What The Broadband Comparison Sites Won't Tell You

Barry Collins exposes the misleading information pumped out by some of the biggest broadband comparison sites

- Barry Collins

Fed up with your broadband provider? Like millions of others, you might well decide enough is enough, punch your postcode into a broadband comparison site and see what the others have to offer. After all, Ofcom-approved sites such as broadbandcompared.co.uk “compare the UK’s best broadband”, or broadbandchoices.co.uk lets you “find the best deal possible”.

Except, as our investigation will show, that’s often not the case. For starters, many of these sites fail to list the very best broadband providers out there, including the one you’ve voted as the best broadband provider for the past 15 years. The information they provide is often woefully inaccurate and misleading. And can you really trust such sites to push you towards the cheapest deals, when they make more money by selling more expensive packages or by getting you to click on sponsored links? We’ve been comparing the comparison sites to find out what they’re not telling you.

Thin Selection

Let’s start with the biggest charge against these comparison sites: that they’re only showing you a fraction of the available deals.

All of these sites make money from affiliate revenue, where they take a cut of any new customers they push towards the listed broadband providers. That normally means an ISP has to be willing to appear on the sites in the first place, with some of the smaller, independent and more respected broadband providers opting not to take part in the horse-trading.

Most of the big providers – BT, Sky, VirginMedia, TalkTalk – will appear across almost all of the comparison sites. Smaller providers such as the PC ProAward-winning Zen Internet, A&A and IDNet rarely appear.