Broadband checker
For anyone working from home, the connection is part of the house. HouseLens shows Ofcom's availability data and mobile coverage on the listing itself, so a slow street never surprises you after the survey.
Listings love the word fibre, but it covers two very different things. Fibre to the cabinet runs fibre to a green box somewhere on the street and copper the rest of the way, and the speed falls off with every metre of copper. Full fibre runs all the way to the home. Both get marketed as fibre; only one of them will feel like it in a house of streamers and video calls. Two homes on the same road can sit on different infrastructure, which is why this is an address-level check, not an area one.
The regulator's definitions give you a fair yardstick. Ofcom calls a connection superfast at download speeds of at least 30 Mbit/s and ultrafast at 300 Mbit/s and above; gigabit means 1000 Mbit/s or more. At the other end, the universal service obligation gives you the right to request a connection of at least 10 Mbit/s, which is the level at which modern family life stops working. What you want to know before viewing is simple: which of those bands does this address actually sit in?
You can check any address for free: Ofcom runs its own coverage checker, and every major provider's site will test an address for you. The friction, as ever, is that portals hide the full address while you browse, so checking ten shortlisted homes means ten rounds of guessing the street number.
HouseLens does the lookup where you already are. The panel shows what Ofcom records as available at the property, in plain bands rather than marketing phrases, next to everything else that matters: sold prices, the EPC, crime, schools and flood risk. Six tabs of checking becomes one glance, on every listing you open.
Mobile coverage is the other half. If you take work calls at home, indoor coverage on your network matters as much as the broadband line, and it is the check everyone forgets until the first dropped call in the living room. HouseLens shows indoor and outdoor mobile coverage from Ofcom's open data alongside the broadband picture.
If the data shows full fibre is available, ask whether the home is actually connected to it; available and installed are different bills. If the street is still copper-only, check whether a build is planned: providers publish rollout plans, and a street due full fibre next year is a different proposition from one with no plan at all. And if you rely on one specific network for work, test your phone at the viewing rather than trusting the coverage map alone; open the panel, then make a call from the kitchen.
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