I often think about what’s an ‘essential’ to our family life and what we could easily do without and I’ve come to the conclusion that we could do without our holidays, our days out, our little treats here and there and we could even go without our TV if we really had to cut down on our outgoings.

One thing I don’t think we could do without anymore would be our super-fast Broadband and if you’re rolling your eyes and shaking your head at this point (I bet you are) thinking that broadband is a luxury that we could easily do without then I’m going to tell you why it’s an essential and hopefully make you think again.

I’m a blogger who makes a reasonable income from my blog, I also work in social media for my main job and I’m studying for a degree so I absolutely need to have access to super fast Fibre Broadband.

The kids watch YouTube and Netflix, play on their games consoles and more importantly do their homework using the internet and although I agree that it’s not a necessity as such for them and that they could do without it, they’d definitely struggle.  Given the choice they’d give up any of the things I mentioned above to continue to have access to the super fast broadband that we currently have.

Mr Frugal is the one who fusses about internet speeds and other technical things as he likes to relax on a night by playing a game on is PS4 while I’m catching up on my blogging work. He doesn’t drink, smoke or spend money on anything other than the odd game so again, whilst super-fast fibre broadband isn’t an essential, it’s certainly right up there for him.

Before we got our super fast fibre broadband installed, we really struggled as a family to get a balance of internet usage and always had to be mindful that if one of the kids wanted to watch YouTube or if I wanted to upload anything onto my blog then it would impact everyone else’s internet.

There was forever fights between the kids as one of them was watching YouTube so the other one couldn’t do much at all online without it cutting out because YouTube was using all the bandwidth.  Even Mr Frugal got frustrated as he kept getting kicked from games when one of us started doing something on the internet which caused his game to slow down in speed (he calls it ‘lagging’).

It was really starting to impact my blogging as uploading photos slowed everyone’s internet down ridiculously and if I ever needed upload a video the I had to try and time it so that I could upload it through the day so it didn’t impact everyone.

Is it anyone wonder that Mr Frugal was constantly on the phone trying to find out when super-fast broadband was coming our way.  He even used to go out and talk to any engineers that he was working in the street and once even ended up having a cuppa (that I had to make) with one of them who was filling him in on the plans for the area.

The day we got super-fast broadband installed was a good day!

Mr Frugal switched on his PS4 and started playing Fifa with Master Frugal while Miss Frugal went upstairs and did her homework before watching Pretty Little Liars on Netflix.  I breathed a sigh of relief at that point as there was no drama but then I heard Master Frugal tell his Dad he was going to watch YouTube for a bit and I held my breath until about 30 seconds after his video had started when I realised that the usual arguing about someone using up all the broadband hadn’t happened yet.

I remember opening my laptop that night and sneakily uploading a photo just to see if it was possible that we could all be on the internet at once and when the angry shouts didn’t come, I breathed a huge sigh of relief!

Since that day we haven’t had a single family argument about broadband so if you have a family who like their technology then I definitely recommend looking at your broadband package and seeing if changing your package can make your life a little easier.

You don’t just have to stick to the traditional providers either as there are a number of other companies who provide a great broadband service that you might not even think of checking.

EE for example seem like they have a great service and Mr Frugal is seriously thinking of changing to them when our current deal ends as we he likes the sound of the fact that all EE Home broadband plans have totally unlimited usage which means there’s no limit to the amount of data you can use!  There’s also no data caps and no download limits which is hugely important to him apparently as he plays some quite data intensive games – he tells me this is important to me too as I upload a lot of photos and videos.  They also offer Superfast fibre – their Fibre Plus is 9x faster than standard broadband.

I’m not techie enough to really claim to know about all that but I do love that having the EE Broadband will an extra 5GB data every month on my EE pay monthly mobile data allowance which is worth £10 a month and will mean I can do more when I’m out and about without worrying about getting close to my data allowance.

Now that I’ve discovered how great it is to have Super Fast Broadband I can’t imagine being without it!

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