UK ISPs PlusNet, Sky and Virgin Media Top 2014 Home Broadband Survey

The results from the joint annual PC Advisor magazine and Broadband Genie Home Broadband Survey 2014 have been announced, which saw PlusNet pick-up the award for ‘Best Broadband Provider’. Sky Broadband, Gigaclear and Virgin Media also picked up some awards.

PC Advisor and Broadband Genie used data from 10,000 survey responses, a “panel of industry experts” (i.e. the Editor of PC Advisor + BB Genie, the CEO of the Broadband Stakeholders group, sales director for business ISP Spitfire and the CEO of the Registered Digital Institute) and 8,000 speedtests to help them decide this year’s winners.

Overall PlusNet scooped the main Best Broadband Provider gong, which was based largely on how 81% of their customers would recommend them. The ISP also achieved the highest customer service rating with 77% satisfied and came top in other areas too.

Meanwhile Virgin Media also came a close second after 82% of their customers said they were satisfied with the reliability and speed of Virgin’s connection, while 81% would recommend the ISP to somebody else. The other awards on the night were as follows.

The Home Broadband Survey 2014 Awards

Best Broadband Provider: PlusNet
Runners-up: Virgin Media

Best Budget Provider: PlusNet
Runners-up: Tesco, TalkTalk

Best Bundled Provider 2014: Sky Broadband
Runners-up: BT, TalkTalk

Most Innovative ISP 2014: Gigaclear
Runners-up: BT, Gigler (CityFibre), Kijoma

Fastest Broadband Provider: Virgin Media
Runners-up: PlusNet

As usual, with the notable exception of the ‘Innovative’ category, the rest of the awards tended to only focus on the biggest broadband ISPs. Curiously it also included BE Broadband, which is now owned by Sky Broadband and hasn’t been taking on any new customers for a while.

Similarly BT was noted as a runner-up in the Most Innovative category and one of the primary reasons, mentioned by PC Advisor’s Editor-in-Chief, is because they have “continued to push the boundaries of speed and reliability, pushing out fibre to the home to increasing numbers of consumers“. This perhaps overlooks that BT has abandoned their original native FTTP roll-out target (here) and recently made FTTP on Demand (FoD) all but unaffordable to anybody except businesses and rich home owners (here).