Fastest Broadband ISP Award Given to Virgin Media and Vodafone UK

The annual Broadband Genie 2018 survey has today announced that Virgin Media have yet again been named as the fastest “widely-available” broadband provider in the UK for download speed (71.5Mbps), while Vodafone took the same award for upload speed (10.1Mbps).

Generally Virgin’s download performance was found to be three times faster than its nearest challenger, while for upload speeds the providers were much closer with just 4.9Mbps separating the United Kingdom’s fastest and slowest performers. Sadly Sky Broadband and TalkTalk were ranked lowest for both categories.

Apparently the awards stem from the result of a collaboration between Broadband Genie and BroadbandUK, which collected 12,908 UK speed test results between 1st July to 31st December 2018. Curiously this year the comparison site won’t be announcing the winners of their other award categories (Best Customer Care, Best Provider etc.) at the same time and these will instead “follow in the coming months.”

Download speed results:

Uploading speed results:

The small sample size above means that this survey was only able to cover the biggest broadband providers, which typically ignores smaller ISPs that so often deliver very good service quality and support. Another caveat stems from using speedtests to rank ISPs, which can be a problem if one provider has more customers on a slower package than others. In other words, such results should always be taken with a pinch of salt.