Opensignal 2024 Study Ranks UK Broadband ISPs by Quality and Speed

Internet benchmarking firm Opensignal has today published their “definitive” 2024 Fixed Broadband Experience report, which gauges the performance of various internet service providers across the UK and then separately across 12 of its regions (inc. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Overall, Virgin Media came top in the national scores, but the regional results are different.

Just for context. Opensignal leverages crowdsourced data collected via end-users on their benchmarking app and services. Due to this there are some caveats to consider because such testing can be impacted by a lot of variable factors, such as poor home wiring (ADSL and FTTC lines), the end-user’s choice of package (e.g. 1Gbps could be available, but people may pick a slower / cheaper tier), local network congestion and slow home WiFi etc.

In addition, the report also seems to include results from some mobile broadband and satellite services (e.g. Three UK and Starlink), which makes for an interesting comparison, albeit one that seems to muddy the traditional definition of “fixed broadband“. Otherwise, the report attempts to categorise its results by several different measurements of user experience: Consistent Quality, Download Speed, Upload Speed, Video Experience and Reliability Experience.

Nationally, Virgin Media sweeps the overall experience table, winning all five of the overall experience awards outright. This means that out of the UK’s national broadband providers, Virgin Media’s users “have the best available experience when streaming video, the fastest average download and upload speeds, and the most reliable, and the most consistent fixed broadband experience“.

National Results – Consistent Quality

Virgin Media 90.4
Vodafone 88.4
Plusnet 87.1
BT 86.6
EE 83.1
TalkTalk 82.6
Sky Broadband 76.9
Three UK 72.3

National Results – Download Speed

Virgin Media 157.4Mbps
Vodafone 77.5Mbps
BT 62.0Mbps
Three UK 54.8Mbps
Sky Broadband 52.5Mbps
Plusnet 52.4Mbps
TalkTalk 48.8Mbps
EE 45.9Mbps

Clearly at this point it helps that Virgin Media has nearly all of their customer base on 100Mbps or faster broadband lines and in urban areas, which is a big help in a study like this. On the flip side, providers with a much more varied mix of slower (e.g. ADSL, FTTC) and faster (e.g. FTTP) broadband technologies, particularly those with many users on those slower lines, are going to be at a disadvantage. But such is the way of things.

Gareth Lister, Director of Connectivity at Virgin Media O2, said:

“We’re committed to providing our customers with fast and reliable connectivity, so being recognised by Opensignal as the best performing provider across all five categories is fantastic news. It is testament to our ongoing investment and hard work to give our customers the best broadband experience possible.”

However, once the report starts to take more of a regional focus, then we begin to see smaller ISPs and alternative networks like Hyperoptic, YouFibre (Netomnia), Zen Internet, Brsk, toob, CommunityFibre and Gigaclear scooping up wins across different categories and locations.

For example, CommunityFibre dominates the London fixed broadband experience, while Hyperoptic is the most awarded ISP in Scotland and YouFibre performs strongly in the North of England. In addition, Virgin Media wins all five awards in Wales and is the most awarded provider in Northern Ireland.

However, the regional results are too tedious to paste into this article, so you’ll need to read the full report for those.