Like anything, doing the research is critical to getting the best solution at the best price. To find the best broadband provider best suited for you, you must know your needs first.

• Do you just need Internet service?
• Do you want a bundled Internet and phone service?
• Are you a business and you want excellent up-time and fast access to help when it goes down? After all, time is money to any business.
• Is the service for personal home use? You may want it to be cheap and you don't care too much about technical support access 24/7 or the occasional outage.

Answering these questions can help better position your research efforts to find the best broadband provider. Once you've done this research you will know what kinds of packages you are shopping for. All ISPs have a bewildering array of packages and plans, so it is best to have decided which type you want early on.

Find out who your neighbours may be using, as often an ISP's true access speed from one city may be totally different from another. It's all to do with the size of the access pipes from you to the Internet backbone. This could help you weed out the ones who may have great deals, but their links are clogged up as they may be oversubscribed. This is often the case, the cheapest is not often the fastest even though they will quote the same speed access as another ISP. Remember, the broadband access speed quoted by ISPs is the maximum access speed you can get, not the minimum.

Finding the best broadband service for you could be the key to a better Internet experience, and can even save you money over a dial-up service. Most people forget to add the phone call flag-fall when making a dial-up internet call to their cost of a dial-up service – this can be substantial. One thing is for sure, most people who get away from dial-up for the first time, even if they have a very small bandwidth requirement, can't believe the speed and convenience difference.

When you go to broadband there is another significant benefit you may have not considered. It's called VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) or broadband phone, and it lets you use your standard telephone to dial and talk to anyone using the Internet as your "channel" of communication. Instead of dialling through Telstra's copper wires, you make calls through your broadband Internet service provider. The cost savings on phone calls can be enormous.