EE Broadband Black Friday deals: EE currently has a special deal for new home broadband customers subscribing by 7 December. All setup fees are waived – saving you £35 on a fibre package – and you’ll also get sent a prepaid gift card containing between £50 and £125 of credit, depending on which broadband package you sign up for. The card has to be activated within 30 days, and the credit – which can be used in most shops that take Mastercard – must be spent within a year.
If you offset this against the total cost of your eighteen-month broadband contract, EE’s cheapest package is effectively reduced from £397 to £337. The 76Mbits/sec Fibre Plus package comes down from £629 to £494, while the top-end Fibre Max deal is reduced from £845 to £710.
Check out EE's Black Friday deals here
EE Broadband review
EE is best known as a mobile phone operator but its home broadband services are well worth a look. There are four packages on offer, covering all the usual performance tiers, from bog-standard ADSL2+ up to a super-fast 76Mbits/sec option for those who live in an area served with fibre-optic cable.
All tariffs are totally unlimited, with no usage caps. And if you’re an EE mobile customer, your subscription also nets you a handy 5GB monthly boost to your mobile data plan.
Aside from that, you can optionally add the EE TV service for an extra £8 a month. This gets you a set-top TV box with access to over 70 Freeview channels, plus internet services like BBC iPlayer and YouTube. Now TV is built in, too, so you can get Sky Sports, Sky Atlantic and other channels via monthly pass, and you can also watch on up to four laptops and mobile devices around the house.
It’s a nice idea, but the price isn’t exactly tempting when you can buy a standalone Now TV box for just £15.
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EE Broadband
EE’s basic service – perhaps slightly confusingly – is just called EE Broadband. This is your basic ADSL2+ connection, with speeds “up to” 17Mbits/sec. In practice, you can expect rates closer to 12Mbits/sec. That’s perfectly fast enough for web-browsing and downloading apps and games but it might start to lag if you want to do lots of things while watching high-definition video and it won’t cut it for 4K streaming (Netflix recommends at least 25Mbits/sec for that).
The service costs £21.50 per month on an 18-month contract, including line rental. That’s more expensive than Sky Broadband, and it’s a longer tie-in period, too. Sky only requires you to commit for 12 months. As we’ve mentioned, though, it does include 5GB of mobile data, which could offset the cost.
Check out EE's Black Friday deals here
EE Fibre and Fibre Plus Broadband
EE’s next tier up is its standard 38Mbits/sec fibre-optic service. If your home is within the coverage area it’s not a bad deal: it’s easily fast enough for HD or 4K streaming and download duties, and costs just £29 per month over an 18-month contract. The setup fee of £35 might feel a bit steep but it includes a Bright Box 2 router, which offers 802.11ac and a single Gigabit Ethernet port (along with three 100Mbits/sec sockets).
Even more tempting is the Fibre Plus package. It’s exactly the same deal, with the same setup fee and 18-month contract duration, but you get twice the bandwidth for an additional £4 a month. That means you can, if you wish, have two 4K streams playing at once in your home and even huge downloads will fly down the line in seconds.
EE Fibre Max Broadband
At the top of the tree sits EE’s £45 Fibre Max service. It’s an interesting one: the connection itself is identical to the Fibre Plus package, with the same Bright Box 2 router and the same 18-month contract. On top of that, however, you also get free calls to landlines in the UK and a decent range of countries worldwide, plus 1,500 minutes of calls to mobiles. It also includes a variety of premium telephony features such as three-way calling, call diversion and automatic rejection of anonymous calls.
Whether it’s worth the money depends a lot on your relationship with your landline telephone. Personally, I wouldn’t go near it: I rarely make voice calls and, when I do, I largely use free VoIP services like Facetime or Skype. But it could be a money-saver for an older person who still prefers to talk the old-fashioned way, or perhaps someone who works from home and has to make a lot of calls.
Check out EE's Black Friday deals here
EE broadband prices and packages
| EE Broadband | EE Fibre Broadband | EE Fibre Plus Broadband | EE Fibre Max Broadband | |
| Price per month, including line rental | £21.50 | £29 | £33 | £45 |
| Setup fee | £10 | £35 | £35 | £35 |
| "Up to" speed | 17Mbits/sec | 38Mbits/sec | 76Mbits/sec | 76Mbits/sec |
| Usage allowance | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Contract length | 18 months | 18 months | 18 months | 18 months |
EE broadband: Coverage
Like most ISPs, EE leases its fibre-optic infrastructure from BT Openreach – so if you can get fibre broadband from BT, you have the alternative option of getting it from EE.
If you’re not sure whether your home is connected to the fibre network or not, you can use the availability checker on EE’s website (https://shop.ee.co.uk/broadband) to see what services you can receive, and get an estimate of the maximum speed you can expect to enjoy.
EE broadband: Performance
Ofcom’s latest ISP performance survey was carried out in November 2016, and EE fared pretty well. On the basic ADSL2+ package, testers saw average download speeds of 11.7Mbits/sec over a 24-hour period – a whisker faster than any other major UK ISP. Even when the line was running at its slowest, download speeds only dropped to 8.1MBits/sec, the same as you’d get from BT.
The company’s fibre-optic packages scored even better. The standard Fibre Broadband package, sold as “up to 38Mbits/sec”, averaged a download rate of 35.2Mbits/sec over a 24-hour period, while the 76Mbits/sec packages averaged 62Mbits/sec. In both cases that put EE at the top of the class, and it was fastest in the upload tests too, for both ADSL2+ and fibre.
Before you get too excited, though, note that several other big ISPs were very close behind. In real-world, use you won’t notice a difference between EE’s speeds and those of BT, Sky or Plusnet. And if you want the very fastest connection, none of these contenders can hold a candle to Virgin, which offers mind-bogglingly fast fibre-optic speeds up to 200Mbits/sec. Even with the slowdown Virgin connections routinely suffer at busy times, it's still noticeably quicker than EE.
As for customer service, EE does a reasonable job and seems to be getting better. Ofcom’s latest consumer satisfaction report notes that EE broadband accounts for 24 out of 100,000 complaints received – significantly lower than BT’s 34, and a great improvement on its peak score of 45 back in in 2015. Again, though, it’s beaten by Virgin Media, which generates just 13 complaints per 100,000, while Sky takes the top spot with a mere eight complaints per 100,000.
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EE broadband review: Verdict
EE is a decent broadband provider. Performance is good, customers seem fairly satisfied overall, and the £33-a-month Fibre Plus package is competitively priced. The Bright Box 2 router won’t win any awards for style or ease of use, but it does support 802.11ac and Gigabit Ethernet, so you can get the best speeds on your home network.
The optional extras, meanwhile, are a mixed bag. The EE TV package isn’t all that appealing but if you’re still a regular landline user then the Fibre Max package could well work out simpler and cheaper than your current arrangement.
And if you’re an EE mobile subscriber then the 5GB data boost could allow you to slash your monthly mobile bills, making this an excellent-value deal – as long as you’re happy to stick with EE for both home and mobile broadband.