We work hard to make sure our customers get a good deal on the services we provide and we have found that no service is more important to the student market than access to a reliable internet connection. No internet means no way of registering with the library, downloading course materials, or even just checking lecture timetables.
Reliability of your student broadband is one thing, but if your “reliable” connection is only pumping out speeds of 2Mbp/s and you live in a house of 4 or more, that reliability won’t mean much when you can’t upload your dissertation on deadline day. Mobile phone data is all well and good when you have it, but those expensive, per Mb charges and patchy network coverage means mobile internet is still no substitute for a good old landline based service.
What do Glide do about it?
Information here is key, we do our best to let our customers know the service speeds that they can expect based on the product they choose. We offer free fibre broadband upgrades when this is available, so if you choose the wrong service when you first join Glide and find that you need a bit more speed, it’s relatively easy to speed you up. You won’t need an engineer visit or even a new router to take advantage of the faster fibre broadband.
Just be careful of the minimum terms. Most fibre broadband contracts are 12 months long and you have to pay to leave early. We offer the shortest fibre broadband contract available of any provider, going as low as 9 months minimum, taking note of the academic year.
Why is fibre broadband so much faster?
Standard broadband travels at the speed of an electrical current. Fibre broadband travels at the speed of light, so unless you’re accessing your service on Jupiter, you’re not going to notice much slowdown between your house and where your internet is travelling from (the local telephone exchange). Electrical signals don’t just get weaker over distance, they are also sensitive to the quality of the cabling they travel through and as most of the cabling is underground or looped over telephone poles, you won’t have much choice over the quality you get. Control what you can, choose light speed!
A typical standard broadband customer can experience speeds as high as 24mbp/s or as low as 1Mbp/s depending on where they live. Although we have a rough idea, until that signal is moving, we don’t know exactly what speed you’ll get. As fibre broadband technology isn’t subject to the same variance, you’re more likely to receive 30Mbp/s at the low end and the full 80Mbp/s (most fibre customers) at the high end.
