ISPA Reveal WINNERS of the 2022 UK ISP Internet Industry Awards UPDATE

The UK Internet Service Providers Association (ISPA) has unveiled the winners of their 24th annual 2022 internet industry and broadband awards, which among other things saw B4RN take home the award for “Best Rural ISP” (second year running), while Brsk was named as the best infrastructure provider with under 100,000 premises.

The award categories have been revised a bit for this year’s event, which is intended to help reflect the changing market of alternative network (AltNet) providers. For example, different awards will now be given to ISPs or infrastructure operators with more than 100,000 customers or premises passed, and also for those with fewer than 100,000 customers or premises passed.

As usual the ISPA Awards were all independently judged by a panel of nine industry experts (senior figures from Cloudflare, JISC, Point Topic etc.), while UK ISPs, web hosts and VoIP providers also underwent some “technical testing” via Thinkbroadband (i.e. this usually involves downstream / upstream throughput, HTTP speed, DNS lookup time and ping times etc.). But we don’t get to see the detailed results from the latter.

The Internet Hero award for 2022 ended up going to the Digital Poverty Alliance, while the Internet Villain (returning after a long absence) was given – more broadly – to “all those slowing down one of the biggest infrastructure upgrades in decades, including landlords, landowners and those adding unnecessary burden to our sector“. Fair enough.

Eagle-eyed readers might also notice that a familiar name scooped the Outstanding Achievement Award, which came as somewhat of a shock. We’ve summarised all the winners below.

Steve Leighton, Chair of ISPA, said:

“The ISPA Awards is a great opportunity to showcase the innovation and progress of the ISP industry over the past twelve months. In what has been another fantastic year with gigabit capable broadband rollout accelerating and record levels of data consumption, it was a pleasure to reward a range of providers – congratulations to all the winners and nominees.

It was lovely to see the industry come together around digital inclusion, raising money for the Good Things Foundation and rewarding the Digital Poverty Alliance. And it was great to see the return of the Internet Villain Award, deservedly awarded to those hindering the rollout of gigabit capable broadband in a light-hearted yet serious way.”

2022 ISPA UK Award Winners

Best Consumer ISP 100K+
Hyperoptic

Hyperoptic has shown consistently good performance, matched by a customer centric approach whilst maintaining their NPS, and their Trust Pilot scores remained high throughout another busy year.

Best Consumer ISP 100K-
CommunityFibre

Community Fibre were awarded the prize for their continuous improvement and investment, as well as innovative work securing Wayleave agreements, and its ongoing support for customers in social housing.

Best Infrastructure 100K+
CityFibre

The judges were impressed by CityFibre’s rapidly growing footprint across towns and cities, offering a multitude of different technologies for different scenarios – including residential, business, powering 5G and custom optical services.

Best Infrastructure 100K-
Brsk

In a crowded field, the Judges rewarded BRSK for going the extra mile, providing solutions to reach problematic areas and persevering in areas where others won’t.

Best Business ISP
CommunityFibre

The judges awarded them best business broadband for showing how an ISP can balance retail and business through their future-proofed infrastructure, speed of deployment and prioritised business support.

Best Rural ISP
B4RN

The judges were unanimous in picking B4RN for not only delivering a public good, working with the local community and reinvesting all their profits, but for being an effective business with some of the highest penetration rates in the UK.

Best VoIP
Voipfone

Voipfone were commended for their support for third party hardware, overall solutions and systems reusability.

Best Cyber Security
Exa Networks

The judges felt that Exa offered a broader range of packages and features that work in combination to provide a really effective solution.

Best Customer Innovation
TrenchesLaw

Trenches Law were deemed worthy winners for helping reduce wayleave issues through their automated wayleave service – leveraging technology to streamline and elongate wayleave process helping accelerate one of the greatest barriers to broadband rollout.

Best Hosted Service
Krystal Hosting

The judges were impressed by Krystal Hosting’s impressive range of innovative products across their channels, including the Elasticsearch plugin for business customers, making it easy to search content, and understand how people are using the service.

Digital Inclusion Award
Libertie Project

The Good Things Foundation awarded the Digital Inclusion Award to Libertie Project for connecting over 1200 households across the Highland Region, bringing support around devices, connectivity, digital support and digital training to one of the most remote parts of the UK.

Internet Hero
Digital Poverty Alliance

At a time where access to good, affordable broadband has never been more important, ISPA Council decided to award the hero prize to the Digital Poverty Alliance for bringing together the disparate work in this area, benchmarking the scale of the challenge and delivering targeted support programmes at specific groups.

Internet Villain
Anti-Broadband Rollout Coalition

This year’s internet villain award went to all those who are hindering and holding back the rollout of gigabit capable broadband, from unhelpful landlords to unresponsive landowners and the vested interests that add unnecessary costs, delay and burdens to one of the biggest infrastructure upgrades in decades. 

Outstanding Achievement Award
Mark Jackson, Editor, ISPReview.co.uk

ISPA Council decided to award Mark Jackson, Editor-in-Chief of ISPreview, for nearly 25 years of keeping industry and consumers informed about the ISP and broadband sector, reporting independently and with great analysis, all the way from dial-up to gigabit broadband.