uSwitch Name the UK Best Mobile and Broadband Providers in 2017 Awards

The annual uSwitch.com Awards 2017 were held last night and this saw Plusnet grab the most wins for fixed line broadband, while Three UK scooped up more wards for Mobile related categories than their competitors and Sky (Sky Broadband) also did quite well on the Pay TV front.

As usual the winners appear to have been selected via a combination of methods, including respondents from a UK consumer survey of 5,620 adults (collected between 15th to 22nd December 2016), a panel of fifteen judges from the national and technology press (e.g. Gemma Morris of Sky News, Dan Simmons of BBC Click etc.) and a couple were selected by using other data that uSwitch had collected (e.g. speed testing).

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a big commercial comparison site, smaller broadband ISPs were nowhere to be seen in the award selection. As a result it’s also no real surprise to find that Virgin Media picked up the award for “Fastest Broadband Provider“, which is based on data from 1.4 million speed tests collected between 1st January 2016 and 31st December 2016. But faster residential ISPs do exist (e.g. B4RN. Hyperoptic, Gigaclear etc.).

2017 Award Winners & Runners Up

One unusual award in uSwitch’s survey appears to be the “Most Popular Broadband Provider” category, which this year went to BT and that’s despite Ofcom reporting that the operator attracted proportionally more complaints than any other broadband ISP during Q3 2016 (here). Apparently the award was decided using a combination of feedback from uSwitch’s consumer panel and internal sales data.

Sadly uSwitch didn’t provide a breakdown of survey responses for each award category, which might have provided some useful insight.