plans, speed and the router

three, though which of them you can pick from depends on what your address can take. put your postcode in and we’ll show you what your line can do.

up to 330Mbps is quiet home, up to 550Mbps is growing, and anything above 550Mbps is busy home. all three include a wi-fi 6 router, 24 hour uk support and something to grow: seeds on quiet home, a living plant on the other two.

there is more on all three on the wi-fi plans page. what changes between them is the plant. quiet home comes with seeds, growing comes with a small plant, busy home comes with a big one. prices depend on your address too, because they depend on which network serves your property.

start with your postcode, because what you can choose from depends on what your address can take. some addresses can have all three. some can have two. if your line only supports the slower speeds there may be just the one, and there is no way for either of us to know until we check.

once you can see what is available, if you are stuck between two, take the bigger one. that is not us selling up, it is the honest answer: the cost difference is small and the cost of being caught short is not. a big download, a work video call that matters, a film on the night everyone is home. headroom is cheap and running out is annoying.

as a rough guide, quiet home suits one or two people doing one thing at a time. growing suits a family with several things going at once and someone working from home. busy home suits a house where everyone is doing something demanding at the same time.

an estimate for your address, and a specific one. anything you see before you put your postcode in is a general figure. once you have, each package shows its headline download speed, and alongside it the estimated download and upload speed for your address, worked out from the network that serves your property.

what we will not do is promise you a fixed number. too much of it sits outside our hands: where the router ends up in your house, a fault on the line, what else is going on around it. telling you that you will definitely get 100Mbps would be a promise we cannot stand behind, so you get an honest estimate instead and we tell you what it covers.

that estimate is the speed arriving at your router. it is not the speed you will get on a phone in the back bedroom, because that depends on your walls, your floors, where the router sits and what else is running in the house. that part is physics rather than your connection, and where the router sits makes more difference than people expect. where to put your router goes through it properly.

once you are connected you do not have to take our word for any of it. the app runs a proper speed test, so you can see the real number yourself, whenever you like. and if it ever comes in under what we estimated, there is a proper way to check it and a route to get it looked at: see "my wi-fi is slow" further down.

that is wi-fi, not your connection. the speed arriving at your router is what you are paying for. every wall and every metre between the router and your phone weakens the signal, so a room two walls away will always read lower.

move the router up high, out in the open, and away from the tv. it fixes more problems than anything else. if one room still will not behave, ring us and we will send an extender.

no. no earth plan has a data cap or a data limit, on any speed and on any contract length. stream, download, work from home and game as much as you want. nothing gets cut off, nothing gets charged extra, and there is no allowance to keep an eye on.

there is no traffic management either, on any of the networks earth uses. we do not throttle heavy users, we do not slow particular kinds of traffic, and there is no quiet policy that starts up on a sunday evening. unlimited here means unlimited.

yes, on every plan. earth includes a wi-fi 6 router as standard, configured before we send it, and it arrives a few days before your switch on date. the activation fee covers setting you up, and there is no monthly rental on top.

the router is loaned to you for as long as you are with earth rather than sold to you, so it stays our equipment and we ask for it back when you leave. nothing to buy, nothing to rent, just something to send back at the end. "how do i cancel?" has the details.

wi-fi 6 is the current router standard and it handles a lot of things at once rather than one after another. the basics explains the rest of the jargon. in a house where five or six phones, two tellies and a console are all connected, that is the difference between everything working and everything stuttering.

older phones and laptops still work perfectly on a wi-fi 6 router. it is included on all three earth plans, not held back for the expensive one.

you can, but it costs you the best part of what you are paying for.

earth keeps an eye on its own routers, checking in with them several times a day. that means we can often spot a problem at your address before you ring us, we can tell what is actually happening on the line rather than guessing, and you can open the app and see for yourself whether there is a fault.

put your own router in and none of that works. we lose the visibility, you lose the app diagnostics, and a fault that would have been a quick fix becomes a long conversation. we will still help, but we will be working blind.