UK ISPs Sky Broadband and Virgin Media Attract the Least Complaints in Q3

Ofcom’s latest quarterly customer complaints report for Q3 2013 has revealed that Sky Broadband and Virgin Media have continued to attract the fewest consumer gripes out of all the major fixed line broadband and phone providers. By comparison BT and EE saw their complaint levels skyrocket.

The data, which only covers telecoms, Internet and TV providers that hold a market share of greater than 4% (i.e. smaller operators don’t produce enough data), notes that the overall level of recorded complaints have increased in the quarter but only slightly.

Generally Sky Broadband and Virgin Media continue to do the best for fixed line broadband ISPs by receiving the fewest complaints, which currently equates to 0.09 complaints per 1000 customers for Sky and 0.08 for Virgin. By comparison EE’s Home Broadband service received the most complaints (0.45) and that’s up sharply from 0.32 in the previous quarter.

The situation is a little bit different for fixed line telephone providers, which saw TalkTalk top the table with the most complaints (0.31) but this is still down slightly from 0.34 in the previous quarter. Meanwhile complaints against BT’s phone lines have jumped to 0.23.

However Virgin Media and Sky Broadband continue to show the lowest level of complaints.

So far BT appears to have suffered a problematic quarter for their broadband or phone services and sadly their Pay TV products are no exception, with the recorded level of complaints jumping from 0.26 to a staggering 0.56 over the quarter.

Most of this is related to their new BTSport TV service, which suffered a few hiccups during its first month of operation. Meanwhile Sky TV (0.02) held steady and Virgin Media (0.05) saw only a tiny increase, yet both have been eclipsed by BT’s problems.

In fact BT’s Pay TV complaints might even be the reason that Virgin increased its share from 0.04 to 0.05. Ofcom states: “The data reported for Virgin Media includes complaints made by its customers about its provision of BT Sport. The data reported for Sky does not include complaints about BT Sport because Sky customers who watch BT Sport do so by subscribing directly to BT Sport“.

Finally, complaints against mobile operators were broadly down but T-Mobile still generated above average complaints of 0.13 per 1,000 customers and this was down from 0.17 last quarter. But the only real rise of note was Virgin Mobile, which increased from 0.07 to 0.09 over the same period.

Ofcoms Q3 2013 Complaints Data
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/../q3-jul-sep-13.pdf