subject: How To Find Student Broadband [print this page] When you're studying full time there are also two things that are quite likely to happen at some point: first, not having much money and/or second, living in a large shared house.
Together those two things present a difficulty for those trying to buy broadband - with other utilities you just divide by the number of people there are but broadband presents a different and unique set of problems.
For example, student broadband needs to be shared between many people who may be downloading a lot of content.
Therefore, a broadband deal with unlimited downloads is likely to be ideal but if students don't get a fair fair use policy as well there is a risk that they'll find their connection throttled or even shut down altogether by their broadband provider.
This is because students are likely to need to download a lot of large files such as reading materials for courses which are increasingly to be found online as well as the more cliched student activities of watching bad afternoon TV shows online.
In balance with this, student broadband also needs to be some of the cheapest broadband available on the market.
The cheapest broadband can include a cheap monthly price plus a dearth of pricey extras such as a one-off installation cost.
There are also one-off costs for hardware such as broadband modems and ongoing subscriptions costs such as home phone packages.
A line rental subscription can also be quite expensive and is necessary if you have ADSL or ADSL2+ broadband at your property.
For this reason, fibre broadband providers which don't require a monthly line rental subscription are ever popular with students and since many universities are city-based they tend to be more able to access this service statistically.
On the other hand, all of the above assumes that as a student you get on with the people that you're living with.
This is often not the case at all which broadband us to the final way to find student broadband deals: compare mobile broadband.
Mobile broadband is truly portable, it can be managed by one individual without the need to split the bill and can be moved from house to house, if living between different places so you're never paying for the service and not using it.
As if this wasn't enough many mobile broadband contracts come with student friendly-extras such as free laptops or netbooks.
For example, any Samsung R530 review worth its salt will tell you that the broadband deal is actually cheaper than getting the netbook and mobile broadband as different products.
On the downside, mobile broadband tends to be expensive when it comes to high downloads - precisely the problem addressed earlier.
When it comes to student broadband it really does depend on the individual situation to dictate what is a good broadband deal.
