Winners of the 2019 ISPA UK ISP Internet Industry Awards Revealed
The UK Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) last night confirmed the winners of their 21st annual 2019 internet industry awards, which among other categories saw Hull provider KCOM scoop the win for “Best Consumer ISP” and altnet FTTH provider TrueSpeed come out top as the “Best Rural Broadband” ISP.
As usual the awards, which were this year been held at the Sheraton Grand Park Lane Hotel in London, are all independently judged by a “panel of industry experts” (people from Jisc, Cloudflare, Point Topic, Accenture etc.), while broadband ISPs, web hosts and VoIP providers underwent some “technical testing” (e.g. downstream / upstream throughput, HTTP speed, DNS lookup time and ping times etc.).
Meanwhile this year’s event also added two new categories for “Best Customer Solution” (i.e. recognises an ISP that has delivered a particularly innovative technological solution to a complex customer issue) – won by BT – and “Best Infrastructure Provider” (i.e. recognises the growing band of companies revolutionising the communications infrastructure) – won by Openreach for their Fibre First strategy (Cityfibre were highly commended).
We think Hyperoptic also deserves a big mention for picking up both the “Best Business ISP” and “Best Customer Service” awards. Rarely does the annual ISPA Awards event pass without them winning something and it tends to be well deserved.
Andrew Glover, ISPA Awards Chair of Judges, said:
“I think a huge congratulations are in order for all of the winners of the 21st Annual ISPA Awards.
The internet sector has now become fully mainstream and is one of the biggest drivers of innovation, growth and overall human satisfaction. Internet related issues now top the list of policy challenges facing policymakers in the UK and across the world.
Whether the issue is full-fibre broadband or online safety, ISPs continue to be a vital voice in these discussions and I am glad that the ISPA Awards reflect the full spectrum of the UK ISP industry and the contributions that the sector makes to businesses and consumers across the UK.”
The only big negative this year was of course that regrettable episode over the “Internet Villain” category, which was completely withdrawn after the ISPA’s decision to include Mozilla in the shortlist for their DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) push (here) resulted in the association facing somewhat of a global public drubbing.
However we do think they should have kept the Villain category since the other two options (Trump and Article 13 in the EU Copyright Directive) were widely accepted. Shame.
2019 ISPA UK Award Winners
Best Consumer ISP
KCOMBest Business ISP
HyperopticBest Rural ISP
TrueSpeed CommunicationsBest Customer Service
HyperopticBest Infrastructure Provider
OpenreachHighly Commended: Cityfibre
Best Hosted Provider
Storm InternetExecutive of the year
Jenny Davies – M247Best Cyber Security
RM EducationBest VoIP
VoipfoneBest PR Campaign
Internet Watch Foundation – #SoSockingSimpleBest Partnership
Exa NetworksHighly Commended: Wifinity
Best Customer Solution
BTInternet Hero
Andrew Ferguson (Thinkbroadband)Highly Commended: Oscar Tapp-Scotting & Paul Blaker, Global Internet Governance Team, DCMS
UPDATE 12:02pm
We’ve had a comment from TrueSpeed.
Evan Wienburg, TrueSpeed CEO, said:
“Winning the ISPA award for Best Rural Broadband ISP in a very competitive field is great news for Truespeed – and is also great news for our growing band of happy customers. We have been focused from day one on helping rural communities bridge the widening rural/urban digital divide by building an ultrafast, highly reliable broadband network that will last for generations.”
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and Linkedin.
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Shame we missed the chance for Andrew to give his award to Mozilla after they cut the Villians!
Congrats to Andrew all the same for his award – well deserved.
Just to add a few words as skipped the speech bit on the night…
Thanks to Mark as his continued coverage of the pleothra of stuff that arrives in the inbox means I often don’t panic/bother with many of these leaving me with the time to get on doing the number crunching.
You both do a job of covering different enough things thats it works well.
Btw: Congrats and all that
This was the episode that made me switch to DoH in my browser and DoT/Private DNS on my phone (which incidentally came with ad-blocking, no root required), so I guess I should be thankful for them raising the issue.
It’s one of the best examples of the Internet viewing censorship as damage and routing around it in a decade.
You need net.trr.bootstrapAddress set to the IP address if you use net.trr.mode = 3 which *forces* it to be used (2 will fallback to regular DNS, currently silently aside from any logs, which seems like a bad idea).
I also had an issue with custom host names, but Firefox now has an excluded hosts preference for that in about:config – network.trr.excluded-domains (added in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1450893 – although maybe not in the beta or release yet).
It’s worth reading the ISPA’s previous post in full as it gives you an idea of what they’re worried about – at least, the things they’re willing to let you know. They won’t draw attention to any government tracking, beyond vague references to GDPR. https://www.ispa.org.uk/ispa-withdraws-mozilla-internet-villain-nomination-and-category/
Many of the proposed conditions sound like wrecking amendments, though – and some also deliberately miss the point of who the “user” is. Children trying to escape censorship by their parents may be entirely valid end-users in and of themselves, regardless of whether they are the ISP’s “main account users – just as those in countries with repressive Internet regeimes may wish to circumvent access restrictions, and avoid arrest or worse, despite the fact that the government exerts control over the ISPs.
And this is why these awards are so fraudulent – you make someone on the board of the ISPA an internet Hero? shouldn’t be allowed to even enter!
About a quarter of the awards are to companies either on the ISPA council
http://www.ispa.org.uk/about-us/organisation/
Or in some fashion have links/ties to the judges
http://www.ispa.org.uk/ispa-awards/judges/ if you research the people enough.
As to the whole Mozilla/Cloudflare thing, i imagine that was more an internal argument that went on seeing as the council is made up of several ISP members that obviously do not like DoH as it can screw with their filtering. While ironically and laughably at the same time they have a judge from cloudflare. Would had been quite funny if the council pressured that Mozilla/Cloudflare got the naughty award when one of the judges is tied to them.
Seems its ok to nominate and give yourselves/panel good boy awards but must not risk awarding your those in your organisation with a naughty boy award.
I wonder if they had a sponsor for the withdrawn “villain” category? They seem to have had one for the “hero” category.
http://www.ispa.org.uk/ispa-awards/sponsors
Did someone get a nice refund? Or perhaps the “villain” category never got sponsored so it was easier to drop that but not so easy to also drop the hero one this year.
Either way ive never took the ISPA awards seriously, if you are going to recommend or just name the best of the best that is what you should do rather than just look at people/organisations who put thereself forward for an award.