Virgin Media Comes Top in 2016 Home Broadband ISP Survey

The latest annual UK Home Broadband Genie 2015 survey has announced that Virgin Media came out top as the overall “Best Broadband Provider“, although Sky Broadband and PlusNet also managed to pick up a few awards in different categories. Sadly TalkTalk often found itself at the bottom of the pack.

As usual the Broadband Genie survey used information collected from 6,768 consumers, as well as the data from 7,948,513 Internet speed tests conducted in 2015 and a judging panel to help them decide this year’s winners. The survey asked respondents to rate ISPs based on their performance across a range of categories, such as customer care, tech support and satisfaction with service speeds.

The judging panel included Jasmine Birtles (Founder of Moneymagpie), Matthew Evans (CEO of the Broadband Stakeholders Group), Matt Egan (Editorial Director at IDG UK), Tom Fellowes (Sale Director at Spitfire), Rob Hilborn (Head of Strategy at Broadband Genie) and Alex Scroxton (Network Editor for ComputerWeekly).

Home Broadband Survey Awards

Best Broadband Provider
Virgin Media 87%
Plusnet 86%
Sky 85%
EE 81%
BT 80%
TalkTalk 72%

Best Customer Care
Sky 91%
Virgin Media 90%
Plusnet 89%
EE 84%
BT 84%
TalkTalk 70%

Most Reliable Broadband Provider
Virgin Media 91%
Plusnet 88%
Sky 87%
BT 85%
EE 83%
TalkTalk 78%

Best Technical Support
Sky 90%
Virgin Media 89%
Plusnet 88%
BT 82%
EE 81%
TalkTalk 68%

Best Value Provider
Plusnet 87%
EE 81%
Sky 79%
Virgin Media 77%
TalkTalk 70%
BT 69%

Most Recommended Provider
Plusnet 85%
Virgin Media 84%
Sky 79%
EE 74%
BT 73%
TalkTalk 60%

Best Home WiFi Router
BT 90%
Virgin Media 89%
Sky 89%
EE 89%
TalkTalk 88%
Plusnet 87%

Fastest Provider (Download Speed)
Virgin Media 46.32Mb/s
BT 21.99Mb/s
Zen 19.84Mb/s
PlusNet 17.39Mb/s
Eclipse 15.47Mb/s
TalkTalk 15.39Mb/s
Sky 13.49Mb/s
EE 13.04Mb/s
Demon Internet 10.39Mb/s

Customer Speed Satisfaction
Virgin Media 93%
Sky 85%
Plusnet 84%
BT 83%
EE 80%
TalkTalk 75%

Judging Panel Awards

Best Budget Provider: Fuel Broadband

Best Bundled Provider: Sky Broadband

Most Innovative Provider: Relish

Best Streaming TV Service: Netflix

Best Catch-up Service: iPlayer (BBC)

Surveys like this only tend to focus on the biggest broadband providers and sadly this ignores the often superior support and service quality of smaller ISPs, although we note that Zen Internet, Eclipse Internet and Demon did at least get a mention in the speedtest data. Otherwise the results should always be taken with a pinch of salt.