The Best Broadband ISPs for 2014 – ISPreview UK Editors Pick

General Commendations

The ISPs listed below haven’t quite made the top recommendations and this is often due to a lack of customer feedback, mixed ratings or the fact that the ISPs only provide a niche service to particular areas of the country (i.e. no national coverage). Never the less we still consider them to be worthy of consideration.

Readers are also urged to visit out our Top 10 Reader Reviewed ISPs page and the Reader ISP Reviews section in general for further options. There are usually plenty of other good ISPs around that might interest you. Now on to the commendations..

* Timico

Admittedly Timico are more aggressively business focused, we don’t have as much feedback for them and they’re perhaps a bit too expensive for home users. Never the less Timico has built itself a strong reputation for quality and their broadband packages are now a lot more accessible, which makes them deserving of a mention.

* B4RN

A truly excellent community built project in the Lower Lune Valley area of rural Lancashire (England), which is rolling out a 1000Mbps capable fibre optic broadband (FTTH) network to local premises.

* Hyperoptic

Another 1000Mbps capable fibre optic provider, albeit this time focused on dense urban areas. At present they only deploy to high rise buildings and apartment blocks in London but significant plans are afoot to expand. Very highly rated.. if you can get it.

* Eclipse Internet

A familiar name to the ISP industry and one that’s had its ups and downs, although they usually manage to deliver a good quality of service and have significant plans to double in size over the next few years.

General Disclaimer:

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 a greater chance of getting burnt).

It’s also 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 (e.g. copper, aluminium, fibre optic, coax etc). Many of these factors will be out of your ISPs ability to control.

Like many sites ISPreview.co.uk’s continued existence as a free source of information is only possible due to the advertising that can be found displayed around our pages (e.g. banners and affiliate links), which is mostly automatic and usually not managed directly by us (e.g. Google Ad Banners). Crucially, and unlike the big comparison sites, we do not charge ISPs a fee to be listed and do not restrict our coverage to only the largest providers. Our impartial policy is to list and cover all legal ISPs in the same way, regardless of advertising.

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