A Comparison of Home Broadband Router Specs from the Big UK ISPs

Which of the UK’s largest home broadband ISPs give you the best wireless router hardware for your internet and home connectivity needs? We take a brief look at the options and specification sheets from BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk, Sky Broadband, Zen Internet, Hyperoptic, Vodafone and KCOM to compare key features.

Sadly very few providers in the market today will publish a detailed feature set for the router(s) they bundle and at best you’ll only ever get a fairly basic summary, which often won’t tell you nearly enough about its actual capabilities. Instead ISPs are far more likely to speak in vague generalisations (e.g. “powerful and reliable wifi“, “superfast router“, “3x faster“), which are largely useless for any practical comparison.

Another crafty trick is when ISPs attempt to positively highlight otherwise common features by expressing them as being somehow unique or advanced, even though such aspects may in fact merely be part of a standard specification that is likely to be shared by nearly all of their competitors.

On the upside many of the routers that come bundled today tend to be fairly capable pieces of kit, which are often significantly better than the rubbish that first generation broadband providers use to dish out a decade ago. Back then it wasn’t uncommon to have problems with WiFi compatibility, crashing and an inability to handle connections from more than a handful of devices at once.

As a result consumers are now much more likely to stick with what their ISP gives them than to go hunting around for a more advanced third-party router, although there’s still a strong market for those who seek cutting-edge hardware. But all this merely makes it even more important to know what you’re getting for your money.

Who Cares About the Router?

At this point some of our readers might be raising their hands to ask an obvious question: “What difference does the router actually make?”

Certainly it’s true that a router with the right modem / chipset could improve your broadband connection ever so slightly, although in the grander scheme of things the ISP will usually aim to supply a device that can cope with the best possible speed of your connection type. Instead the real difference tends to be in what that device can do for your home network.

Naturally there are some fairly self-explanatory things to look out for here, such as the significant factor of wireless network speed and coverage. On this point we recommend looking to identify what WiFi specification is being used (e.g. 802.11n, 802.11ac or the latest 802.11ax), as well as the peak theoretical wireless speed of the device and the number of antennas (note: bundled routers tend to only offer internal antennas).

In addition, you’d definitely want a router that can support both the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz radio spectrum bands for maximum performance. Both should be common today and if the kit that an ISP supplies doesn’t support both then it may be best avoided (2.4GHz alone is slow and congested). We recommend reading our ‘Top WiFi Boosting Tips‘ for more info. on wireless performance as it’s quite an extensive subject.

Elsewhere you should also consider whether the router includes USB ports (i.e. how many, what version (v3.0+ is fastest) and what devices can it connect – storage, printers, 4G mobile adapters etc.), as well as the speed of any Ethernet LAN (wired network) ports on the back (100Mb vs 1000Mb etc.). We’d also look out for a WAN port as this will enable you to connect another router (e.g. when opting to use the ISP’s router as just a modem).

Now on to the hardware comparison..