The Most Common Broadband and TV Issues by Each Major UK ISP

A new Which? survey of more than 3,000 customers from five major UK broadband ISP and TV providers – including BT, Sky Broadband, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and EE – has found that two thirds of respondents experienced at least one problem with their service in the past year, while 30% said the price they pay had increased.

The most common problems identified across all of the listed providers were slow connection speeds, frequent connection drop-outs and router issues, each of which affected around one in five TV and broadband customers. Sky Broadband appeared to fair the worst for slow speeds, which perhaps isn’t a surprise since a greater portion of their base will still be on less reliable copper ADSL and hybrid fibre FTTC (VDSL2) lines.

Meanwhile, TalkTalk and Virgin Media (VMO2) shared the top spot for frequent connection drop-outs, with Virgin also being the most prominent provider for router issues, which affected just under one in four of their customers.

Perhaps surprisingly, BT were judged to have done the best overall because they had the greatest proportion of customers who hadn’t experienced any problems in the past year (35%), but on their flip side their sibling EE did the worst with a score of just 15%. The table below doesn’t fully reflect this and Which? fails to identify the X axis. Sadly the data provided is very limited, making it hard to draw any solid conclusions.

We should point out that not all of the above issues may be the fault of the provider itself and, in some cases at least, a problem within your home or local network could also be to blame (e.g. slow WiFi, poor cable connectivity etc.). Not every person has the necessary skills to correctly identity and diagnose the cause of such issues, which tends to result in all such gripes being levelled at the broadband or TV provider.