Small businesses, home workers and those seeking stronger reliability in general often have to consider paying extra for service quality. Here’s our pick of several highly reliable ISPs that have a tendency to place quality, support and service above price. It’s noted that, during 2009, some of these ISPs did suffer from teething problems as they upgraded to use BT’s latest 21CN technology, although most of those problems have been resolved. We use an approximate price point of £25 as a benchmark for each of the ISPs listed below.

Zen Internet (Type: BT based ADSL / ADSL2+ Broadband)
Reason: Zen remain one of the longest standing and most well recognised of small and medium sized ISPs, with a strong history of awards being associated with their name. They are highly rated by visitors to our website (Zen Reviews) and we have never known them to have any truly major problems.

Typically such quality comes at a price, with £24.99 inc. VAT per month getting you an ‘up to’ 20Mbps package and 25GB’s (GigaBytes) of monthly download data allowance (unlimited uploads). Potential subscribers should take note of the extra services too, with highlights including a 1 month contract, anti-virus filtering, 2GB of web space and up to 8 free static IP addresses.

IDNet (Type: BT and LLU Unbundled based ADSL / ADSL2+ Broadband)
Reason: Despite initially suffering a few teething problems during 2009 with their transition onto BT’s latest 21CN platform (as many ISPs did), IDNet remains a generally strong and reliable provider. IDNet frequently wins high praise from readers of independent consumer sites such as ours (IDNet Reviews).

Like Zen, IDNet’s services don’t come cheap and just under £24.46 inc. VAT per month will net you an ‘up to’ 24Mbps connection (1.4Mbps upload), 30GB’s peak (60GB off-peak) monthly data usage allowance, anti-virus/spam filtering, 2GB web space, 1 month contract and 1 free static IP address among other things. It's also possible to bundle phone line rental from +£10 extra per month.

AAISP (Type: BT and LLU based ADSL / ADSL2+ Broadband)
Reason: AAISP (Andrews and Arnold) is easily one of the smallest and technically niche ISPs on this year’s shortlist of options. They are also one of the most expensive and their website is filled with enough jargon to make the average persons head explode. However this is not a weakness, AAISP offers strong reliability and extremely knowledgeable technical support, albeit with packages that seem more focused towards business users and telecoms experts (AAISP Reviews).

Frustratingly AAISP has just adopted yet another new pricing system for their packages, which makes it difficult to confidently decipher precisely what you get or how much you'd pay for it. We hope they will simplify the pricing structure soon because there is an excellent provider under all the jargon.

ICUK (Type: BT and LLU based ADSL / ADSL2+ Broadband)
Reason: ICUK, much like AAISP, is another ISP that often slips under the radar when most consumers are making their new provider decisions. They’re moderately well priced and have received a lot of positive feedback in our reviews system (ICUK Reviews) over a period of several years.

Paying £25 per month will give you download speeds of ‘up to’ 16Mbps (1.3Mbps upload), a 1 or 12 month contract option (12 months = free migration/activation), unmetered monthly downloading and email with anti-virus/spam filtering. Extra services are not as rich as some of the above choices but they’re not bad either.

Fast.co.uk (Type: BT based ADSL Broadband)
Reason: Though perhaps more of a vISP and thus often not chosen in award shortlists, Fast.co.uk has managed to gain itself a surprisingly good reputation for service quality and customer support. Few of our visitors have had anything bad to say about them and they can usually be found hovering between the 1st and 2nd place of our Readers Top 10 (Fast.co.uk Reviews).

Paying just over £22.99 per month will give you an ‘up to’ 8Mbps (0.45Mbps upload) broadband package (24Mbps coming soon), 20GB of monthly usage allowance, a 3 month contract and the usual array of basic service features (email, anti-virus/spam etc.)