The UK Best Broadband ISPs for 2013 – ISPreview Editors Pick

General Commendations

The ISPs we list below haven’t quite made the top recommendations, often due to a lack of consumer feedback or mixed ratings, but can still be worth trying. Readers are urged to check out our ‘Top 10 Reader Reviewed ISPs’ page and the ‘Reader ISP Reviews’ section in general for further options.

In addition it’s often worth keeping an eye on the Awards Category of our news system, which lists the awards that other organisations and magazines have given to various different UK providers. This can be useful for identifying a common trend of good performance among particular providers.

* Eclipse Internet

* Aquiss

* Vispa

* O2 and BE Broadband (suffered a few routing problems in 2012 and lacks superfast broadband but still a reasonable ISP)

We always attempt to pick ISPs that have shown fairly consistent performance and reliability over the past 12 months but there is no such thing as perfection and experiences do differ, especially with broadband being a shared “best efforts” service. Often even poorly rated ISPs can deliver an excellent service; although the ratio of dissatisfied customers to satisfied ones will be higher (i.e. you stand more chance of getting burnt).

It’s important to remember that ISP service quality can vary from location to location and is affected by many different factors, such as the length of your phone line, local capacity at the telephone exchange and the type of line itself (i.e. copper, aluminium, fibre optic or coax etc). Many of these factors will be out of the ISPs ability to control.

* NOTE 1: The pricing and recommendations of this article are only valid for the date published.

* NOTE 2: Coverage of FTTC superfast broadband services is very limited (40% of the UK, rising to at least 66% by spring 2014). Virgin’s cable platform similarly only covers half of the country and is generally limited to urban areas.