PC Pro Award Zen Internet and Giffgaff Best for Broadband and Mobile
PC Pro magazine has released the results of their annual 2019 awards, which saw ISP Zen Internet once again being named as the UK’s “Best Broadband Provider” for the 16th consecutive year. Meanwhile giffgaff scooped the award for “Best Mobile Data” operator. Sadly the results were not so good for the market’s biggest providers.
As usual the outcome was based on a survey of nearly 8,000 participants, which quizzed each respondent for their impressions of customer support, reliability, value for money, speed and whether or not they’d buy the service again. The scores were then combined to produce an overall satisfaction rating.
In the end Zen Internet secured an overall rating of 95%, while giffgaff topped the table with a respectable 86%. You will of course need to buy the magazine to see all of the results, but we’ve summarised the overall ratings for each of the two telecoms related categories below. Notable is the fact that most of the major providers sink to the bottom of the table.
Paul Stobart, CEO of Zen Internet, said:
“These awards are voted by customers and you can’t get a better endorsement than that. We pride ourselves on our reliability and customer service, but we can never afford to take this reputation for granted. That is why we work tirelessly to ensure we are ahead of the curve when it comes to offering fair service across our product portfolio.
We introduced our Lifetime Price Guarantee – Price for Life – initiative earlier this year, for example, to reward customer loyalty and we also demonstrated that we are keen to lead the way by being amongst the first providers to sign up to Ofcom’s auto compensation scheme back in April.”
As usual there is the obvious caveat here that this survey was simply too small to include most of the markets smallest ISPs.
Best Broadband
Zen Internet 95%
Utility Warehouse 91%
Plusnet 78%
EE 74%
Virgin Media 73%
Vodafone 67%
Sky Broadband 67%
BT 66%
TalkTalk 62%Best Mobile Data
Giffgaff 86%
Tesco Mobile 83%
Three UK 77%
BT Mobile 77%
Plusnet 77%
iD Mobile 75%
Virgin Media 75%
EE 75%
O2 74%
Vodafone 70%
One other category that may be worth a mention was the “Best Router Brand“, which saw AVM Fritz!Box, Ubiquiti and DrayTek share the top spot with an overall rating of 91%. They were followed by Asus on 87%, TP-Link on 86% and Zyxel also on 86%.
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.
« UK ISP BT Goes Live with New Ultrafast 5G Mobile Plans on EE
Latest UK ISP News
- FTTP (5530)
- BT (3518)
- Politics (2542)
- Openreach (2298)
- Business (2266)
- Building Digital UK (2247)
- FTTC (2045)
- Mobile Broadband (1977)
- Statistics (1790)
- 4G (1668)
- Virgin Media (1621)
- Ofcom Regulation (1465)
- Fibre Optic (1396)
- Wireless Internet (1391)
- FTTH (1382)
Giff Gaff at the top and Voda at the bottom? Who is this from, the always wrong on every subject Reddit posters? Or teenagers where the only criteria is cost? (That might be exactly the same group.)
I have always found PC pro a great source of reviews, with their A lists etc. But this is the complete opposite of my real world experience.
To be fair giffgaff do seem to have come top of several other surveys this year.
From the second paragraph of the article:
“As usual the outcome was based on a survey of nearly 8,000 participants, which quizzed each respondent for their impressions of customer support, reliability, value for money, speed and whether or not they’d buy the service again. The scores were then combined to produce an overall satisfaction rating.”
Of course, these scores may not reflect your own personal experience – but they do reflect that much larger dataset of 8,000 other peoples’ experiences.
@Mark Well something radical must have changed, as I tried them some years ago and found them to be so slow as to be unusable. The “goodybag” was never used and the sim went in the shredder.
I did just Google giffgaff slow and found many people asking why its so slow from 2018 and 2019. The general opinion when I did the same years back was that the network was far to over subscribed due to the low costs and did not have unrestricted access to the normal o2 network.
Actually on their forum right now is a post from half an hour ago “Very Slow 4G + Data Dropouts”
I think them coming top of any list has to taken with a large pinch of salt.
It’s a slow network because it uses O2 and an MVNO operator, and considering Ofcom have fined if I remember O2 for throttling it’s own customers, you can imagine what MVNO’s are like. It’s why I left Tesco Mobile for Smarty, you can actually use the Internet with 2 bars as opposed to having 4 and no internet access..
Personally so far I’m happy with Smart for mobile and IDNet for broadband and phone.
Taking your comments about giffgaff, I love that I can change my goodybag from month to month, I can plan ahead depending on my upcoming events, when I go on holiday I take the top tier, when at home I take one of the lower tariffs, I am cost minded, and I think most old Geezer’s like me are, its not only the teenagers.
“Who is this from, the always wrong on every subject Reddit posters? Or teenagers where the only criteria is cost? (That might be exactly the same group.)”
If it were from the groups you describe Talk Talk and Plusnet would had been top as they are the more bargain basement ISPs. One could of course argue your dismissal of certain groups voice not counting though says far more. Even more as you have continued to try to ram your pointless argument home… AS USUAL.
@Mark
Well anyone can buy a sim on PAYG add the initial credit which will sit there for ever and then talk rubbish on the forums and make a pretty penny from it. I do wonder if giffgaff didn’t do payback if they would still get the same?
I was a customer for a while and I never posted on the forums but I looked and people were reporting £300+ every 6 months, that’s a reverse loyalty model it seems.
giffgaff here 981kbps all the time – EE here 180mbps+ most days Mbps – totally an advert and not a pole IMHO
“8,000 participants, which quizzed each respondent for their impressions of customer support, reliability, value for money, speed and whether or not they’d buy the service again. The scores were then combined to produce an overall satisfaction rating.”
Your precious BT/EE must have sucked in every regard apart from the speed… Shame.
I dont wan’t to labour a point, but looking at the review in PC Pro. It says that GiffGaff got 83% for speed, beating both BT and EE who scored 80%. Three having 78% and Voda on 76%.
But when we look at Open Signals Mobile network experience chart from April 2019. We see that EE had 32.5 Mbps, Three 21.6 Mbps, Voda 24.3 Mbps and o2 came last at 15.8 Mbps and that is native O2, not a MVMO with lower priority to the network.
PC Pro also goes on to say that this is the third year in a row GiffGaff have won the best award! Definitely take this report with a large pinch of salt.
You need to take the awards in context. The Awards are based on actual customer feedback, not tests. This is a very valid measure. So when GiffGaff score more highly for speed its saying their customers are happier with their experience of speed than EE’s customers.
It’s not saying the network is faster but that their customers are happier with the speed.
“8,000 participants, which quizzed each respondent for their impressions of customer support, reliability, value for money, speed and whether or not they’d buy the service again. The scores were then combined to produce an overall satisfaction rating.”
Your precious BT/EE must have sucked in every regard apart from the speed… Shame.
A couple of years ago I used to get 40-50Mbps on GiffGaff, now I get 5Mbps on B20 and 15Mbps on B21.
Both full signal (I can see the transmitter).
Go into Worcester and 4G data drops to zero every day around 10:30 and doesnt come back until the evening.
Dropping to 3G gets me just enough to run my payment system, but it ISNT good enough.
GG needs to consider moving networks, even if it means higher costs as O2 is a very bad joke these days.
I should add, they wont be getting an upvote for me for customer support.
I reported THREE times that the Worcester issue was effecting everyone on o2, GiffGaff and Tesco SIM’s and they kept telling me to try a new SIM.
## idiots.
@captain.creitn
Gifffgaff is a MVNO owned by 02 so are always going to be on 02.
The users of Gifffgaff must have very low baseline of want counts as good mobile data, I did test GG years ago data was a joke it mainly due to being a MVNO so the data is low priority and the host network 02 being the slowest of all the 4 mobile networks.
Not sure why people use giftgiff as you can get sim only deal on better network for around the same prices of their goody bag.
The users that can not read a story about how and what was rated must have a very low baseline for brain power.
In my household we have services from EE, GIFFGAFF and ID mobile. In the way we use our mobiles – social media, browsing, email, WhatsApp – we can not perceive any tangible difference in speed.
But what is extremely obviously is the overall experience of being a GIFFGAFF customer. Everything is just so much easier with GIFFGAFF. The self-service tools are excellent, the website is easy to use. Prices are fair and easy to understand. The way they respond to issues is excellent. For example when O2 had the major network outage last year, I happened to still have an O2 service and my GIFFGAFF service. GIFFGAFF contacted me proactively to apologise and offer compensation. I had to contact O2 myself and argue for compensation.
@Ryan
Payback – pure and simple..