uSwitch’s 2016 Broadband Awards Praise Virgin Media and PlusNet

The annual uSwitch.com Broadband Awards 2015 were held last night and suffice to say that two ISPs dominated the evening more than most, Virgin Media and Plusnet. Both providers managed to sweep a bunch of gongs in different categories, although Virgin clearly picked up the most.

As usual the winners were picked by using a combination of feedback from some 5,000 “bill-payers and broadband decision-makers“, broadband speed tests and the opinions of a unique judging panel, which broadly consisted of technology and consumer finance journalists from the BBC, This is Money, The Times, The Guardian, Sky News, Stuff.TV, The Mirror and a few others.

It’s particularly interesting to see that Plusnet do so well, especially given the gripes about customer support and the loss of so many critical service features (e.g. 24/7 phone support) that occurred last year. Despite all that they still managed to swipe the “Best Customer Service” category.

Elsewhere TalkTalk and Sky Broadband both won the “Best Broadband Innovation” gong, which reflected their joint 1Gbps FTTH broadband deployment in York with Cityfibre.

However it’s important to note that the winners and runners-up table for the uSwitch awards only included the market’s largest providers, which is perhaps to be expected given how uSwitch doesn’t appear to list smaller ISPs on their website (e.g. Virgin might be the “fastest” national broadband ISP, but quite a few smaller providers offer far faster connectivity).

We would have also liked to see some more detail and rational for how the various results were arrived at.