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Zen Internet Named Best UK Broadband ISP in Which? Survey

Saturday, Mar 19th, 2022 (12:01 am) - Score 3,688
gold best broadband isp award cup

Consumer magazine Which? have published a partial summary of the results from their first biannual survey of the best and worst UK internet providers for 2022, which names Zen Internet as the best overall provider for the seventh consecutive year – delivering a customer satisfaction score of 74% (9% more than the next nearest ISP).

The survey itself was conducted by Deltapoll between December 2021 and January 2022 with 3,903 members of the magazine (i.e. those who subscribe to a related broadband package). Sadly, Which? has long since stopped providing a usefully structured public summary of the results, and thus we only get a scattergun approach of partial details. As usual, you have to buy the magazine to see everything.

Nevertheless, we do learn that the worst performing ISP overall – for the second year in a row – turned out to be John Lewis Broadband, which is based on a managed product from Plusnet (we’re told PN themselves performed much better, but no data is included to prove that). Some 25% of JLB’s customers said they were dissatisfied with their service, while speed and connection reliability both earned JLB a “feeble” 2 out of 5 stars.

We’ve put together a rough summary of the other results below, albeit somewhat limited due to the almost total lack of any appreciable structure in how Which? reports the outcome of their studies these days. As such, what you see below is pretty much everything Which? has provided.

Highlights of 2022 Which? Broadband Survey

Virgin Media was second from bottom in Which?’s rankings, being the lowest-rated of the Big Four providers. Virgin only managed 2 stars for both technical support and how easy it was to contact customer services. It also scored a measly 2 stars for value for money, with 21% of customers saying it performed poorly.

Sky Broadband was joint eleventh (alongside SSE) out of the fourteen providers ranked, earning just 2 stars in five out of the seven categories marked. Which? said customers were let down on the basics – the speed and reliability of its connections, but they provided no details to support this.

TalkTalk sat in eighth position of the rankings. It received a reasonable 3 stars for customer service, but fell down when it came to technical support, where it only managed 2 stars.

BT and subsidiary EE (Broadband) placed joint sixth in the satisfaction rankings. BT customers generally seemed satisfied, if not overly enthusiastic – it got 3 stars in nearly all categories. BT customers were also more likely to say they had never switched providers before taking out their current contract.

Hyperoptic was named as one of the “top ranked providers,” but once again again Which? failed to provide any data to support this.

One other caveat with the aforementioned study is that, with so few consumers involved, it cannot possibly cover all of the markets many smaller ISPs.

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Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
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 .
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Comments
17 Responses
  1. Avatar photo RaptorX says:

    They’re pretty good, but AAISP is better and are worth checking out.

    It’s a bit odd about John Lewis though, since this company prides itself on great customer service, so going plusnet isn’t a good strategy as it has proved.

    1. Avatar photo Anonymous says:

      I always considered it odd too

    2. Avatar photo Alex A says:

      Maybe they’ll change in the future to another provider to resell such as TalkTalk which is used by Cuckoo and some others. Lack of FTTP might also be frustrating John Lewis who can’t sell faster packages and can’t get new customers in copper stop sell areas like Salisbury.

      Who operates the John Lewis Broadband support lines?

    3. Avatar photo Ben says:

      It’s particularly interesting because JLB is simply a thin brand in front of Plusnet. The website clearly says “John Lewis Broadband is a trading name of John Lewis plc, but the services are provided by Plusnet and the contract for these services is between you and Plusnet plc”. Perhaps John Lewis customers have higher expectations?

    4. Avatar photo Sam B says:

      AAISP are very good, but are expensive and don’t offer unlimited packages which isn’t acceptable in this day and age, IMO.

    5. Avatar photo DFS says:

      @Anon
      We’re in 2022, not in 2005. If the likes of Zen, IDNet , Aquiss and other smaller high quality niche operators can offer truly unlimited data allowances then A&A could also do the same. But they prefer not to buy sufficient bandwidth despite bandwidth costs having come down massively in recent years.

      It’s the only company I’ve ever heard of which doesn’t want to expand and gain new business. I suppose that annual around the world cruise and a new Tesla for his son each birthday somehow has to be paid for….

    6. Avatar photo Ferrocene Cloud says:

      Feels more like a cult with A&A customers sometimes, with customers completely incapable of looking at the current market conditions. And for all the excellent support, it’s not really needed if the service never breaks, and FTTP is extremely reliable. I’m sure back in the age of dodgy DSL lines it was definitely worth a provider that would go to bat for you, but those days are coming to an end. A&A can leave their business model back in the 90s where it belongs.

      In a year with Zen I’ve had zero problems, and about 30 minutes of downtime due to BT planned works.

      Meanwhile I can get the top tier FTTP package with no usage restrictions.

    7. Avatar photo RaptorX says:

      I agree with those on here who are pointing out that not having an unlimited data cap isn’t acceptable nowadays, heck even a decade ago.

      Thing is, with 5TB / month, on a slower connection it’s impossible to hit that limit even flat out 24/7 therefore making it effectively unlimited.

      AAISP are upgrading their Firebricks so that they can soon offer a 900Mbps service. It will be interesting to see what data cap they use then, or if they’ll finally remove it altogether and get with the times. Staying intentionally niche is bad business strategy and could eventually kill them if people leave en-masse. And for such an excellent ISP, that would be a huge shame.

    8. Avatar photo Andrew Clayton says:

      @RaptorX

      > I agree with those on here who are pointing out that not having an unlimited data cap isn’t acceptable nowadays, heck even a decade ago.

      Well, clearly they are still acceptable and the reasoning for them has been well discussed.

      > AAISP are upgrading their Firebricks so that they can soon offer a 900Mbps service.

      Existing customers can already request regrades to higher speeds (their top tier is 1000/115), should become openly available in April.

      https://www.aa.net.uk/etc/news/new-core-routers-and-faster-speeds/

      > It will be interesting to see what data cap they use then, or if they’ll finally remove it

      Why should they remove it? Unless you’re saturating your connection 24×7 (and if you are, A&A actively don’t want you) then there’s likely no issue. No doubt usage allowances will be increased again at some point as has happened in the past.

      I would suggest most people *currently* don’t *need* gigabit speeds (it seems to be mostly about “my connection is faster than yours…” which at some point becomes totally irrelevant), of course having the future capacity there is good.

      What the extra speed buys you is less time waiting for those large downloads, and you likely aren’t doing that 24×7, or allowing for more 4K streams, but even with a few of them on the go the bandwidth requirements are not huge.

      I couldn’t wait to switch to FTTP, not for a massive speed increase, but for a better quality of Internet connection. Currently on A&A Home::1 5TB FTTP 80/20 and for me that’s generally plenty fast enough.

    9. Avatar photo Bob says:

      @ Andrew Clayton
      In that case perhaps you’d like to explain why other smaller ISPs have scrapped data limits and moved into the 21st Century? If other CPs can invest in additional bandwidth then why can’t AAISP? What makes AAISP’s case so special? They’re fleecing their customers under the guise of superior support.

    10. Avatar photo Andrew Clayton says:

      @Bob

      One of Andrews & Arnold’s tenets is to never be the bottleneck. IIRC they try to keep their pipes at 50% utilization during busy times, so that even if there was some sudden spike in traffic for some event, they should have the capacity to handle that and with their CQM (Constant Quality Monitoring, the graphs you see in the control pages), every packet is accounted for.

      Thus their pricing and usage limits help in that goal. They have made no secret in wanting to keep away certain types of users.

      > They’re fleecing their customers under the guise of superior support.

      Hmm, not really. I have 5TB of monthly allowance, with unused roll-over I generally have over 9TB a month usage allowance. The most I’ve used in a month is ~750GB, that covers two of us doing plenty of video streaming. So for me, it is effectively unlimited and that’s the idea with the TB packages.

      At the end of the day, you can use them or not… obviously enough people see the advantages of what AAISP offer and stand for. I’ve been with them for around 19 years, Demon before that (I think quite a few people went Demon -> AAISP), some of the reasons I chose them where; unfiltered Internet connection, some UK based Linux kernel hackers used them, Linux and open source friendly & these days lack of IPv6 support would be a show stopper.

    11. Avatar photo Bib says:

      My reason for staying with A&A is because of the IPv6 & IPv4 subnet availability. I’ve never come close to using up all my monthly allowance. It’s not all about watching 4k movies all the time.

  2. Avatar photo Sam says:

    The ordering process and communication from them was poor. The openreach engineer didn’t install my fibre correctly, however their technical support was great.

    I won’t be using them again when my contract expires though.

  3. Avatar photo Eci user says:

    Been with them over 2 years. Not the cheapest it has to be said, plain old vdsl. Never had to call them as it doesn’t go wrong…

  4. Avatar photo idnetuser says:

    When will IDNET win they are much better than Zen!!!

  5. Avatar photo Zen is not good says:

    We all had ZEN installed at home for night-working on a big contract for corporate systems. Nothing but systemwide outages galore every week, causing an emergency meaning we had to drive into the company offices to complete the work we were supposed to do at home.

    Wouldn’t touch ZEN if it was the last ISP in the country. We will never give them any business again. Why do people trumpet this company as good? Low standards unreliable ISP.

  6. Avatar photo Grimreaper says:

    [quote]They have made no secret in wanting to keep away certain types of users.[/quote]

    Users who want to live in 2022?

Comments are closed

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