I tried Martin Lewis' haggling method - now I have faster broadband for less

I tried Martin Lewis' haggling method after my broadband issues - and now I have better broadband for less, despite leaving mid-contract.

I'd been with Sky for years. When we moved house, we renegotiated our package because we no longer needed boosters - our flat had thick walls, so the signal used to struggle. Thankfully, we cut costs because we ditched them, but it was still expensive: for basic broadband, we were being quoted close to £50 a month, with no extras or add-ons.

This was too expensive, especially with a council tax rise and higher energy bills on the way. Fast forward to last month, and we had an outage that lasted a couple of weeks, and Sky told us that because of this, we could leave mid-contract and it would waive the early termination fee - phew!

Honestly, we didn’t want the faff of leaving and restarting the switchover, as this often means your bill jumps for the first month or two while everything settles. So we wanted to stay, but when we haggled, Sky said the best they could do was cut our bill by £3 each month - and the "best" part was it would tie us in for another two years.

I don't know about you, but after an outage, I found the whole two-year contract a tad cheeky. So we told them to continue with our cancellation if that was the best they could offer. And cancelled it was.

Interestingly, Money Saving Expert (MSE) , founded by Martin Lewis, have written in their Sky broadband tips blog: "If you've had issues with Sky in the past, such as slow broadband or long customer service call waiting times, politely tell them when you haggle. It's useful ammunition – they should want to try and make it up to you."

Sadly, they didn't want to seem to make it up to us and if we’d taken the deal, it would have been around £30 a month for Full Fibre 500 (we already haggled more than tenner off when we moved) - and while that might not sound like a lot to some for broadband users, we’d seen EE offering double our current speed for the same price. That made it a no-brainer, especially because our Sky signal wasn’t great even before the outage - and that's pretty crucial when working from home.

Now we’re on full-fibre gigabit for the same monthly cost we were paying Sky - and when we tested our download speeds, they’d doubled. Not only is our internet faster, but we can watch videos at what feels like lightning speed, my favourite TV shows don’t randomly buffer, and I don’t have to reconnect my phone every day.

Even if Sky didn't waive the fee, we still wouldn't have paid it. Right now, EE says you can "switch from another provider, and we’ll credit your EE account up to £200 towards your leaving fees, or up to £300 if you’re switching TV too."

The Mirror previously reported that Martin Lewis stressed haggling was about winning over the other person. Customers should never be rude to call centre agents, of course.

He explained: "If you say you are going to leave, a company will often put you through to customer disconnections, where there are the people with the real power and authority to give you discounts and deals which will keep you.