No Contract Broadband Plans

While you’re not bound by a contract, switching to a new provider can take some time if you’re still on ADSL – it can be up to two weeks. On the other end of the scale, if you’re lucky enough to have a Fibre to the Home connection, you can switch providers in mere minutes (one of the benefits of the NBN as it was originally planned!) If you’re worried about how long you might be without hom broadband if you switch providers, just call and ask them. They’ll be able to give you the best estimate based on the type of connection at your home.

On a no-contract plan, it’s highly unlikely that a provider will throw in the modem/router you need to connect – so if you don’t already have one, you’re going to have to factor that into the cost. Luckily, high quality brand name modem/routers are incredibly cheap these days, and available from mainstream outlets like Officeworks or JB HiFi. But if you’d rather have the provider send you one, they’ll usually do so at a modest extra cost; it’ll be the same one that you would have gotten thrown in with the deal for free if you’d gone on a contract plan. We’d recommend shopping for your own – which you can then use for any provider you switch to in the future.

Because of the various costs involved in getting broadband connected, your provider will almost always have to pay a third party in order to get your connection activated – whether that be Telstra (to pay for a technician to set up your ADSL at the exchange), the NBN or several others. That cost used to always get passed directly on to the customer in the form of the “setup fee”, but these days, contract plans often waive that fee if you contract for (usually) two years – you being a long-term customer makes it worthwhile for your provider to absorb the costs of getting you set up. On no-contract plans, there’s far more likely to be a setup fee -which is why it’s well worth comparing providers to find those that don’t charge one (they do exist!)