New Survey Reveals Best and Worst UK Cities and ISPs for Broadband Reliability
New research from Broadband Genie, which surveyed 3,200 people across the UK, claims to have identified the best and worst cities, as well as internet providers, for broadband reliability. Overall, Gloucester was named as the best UK city for reliability (only 8% experienced outages last year), while Belfast (51%) was the worst.
The somewhat anecdotal survey asked participants how many outages they’ve experienced in the last year, where they live and who their broadband provider is. Using this, a reliability score out of 100 was calculated. One possible caveat here is that the survey didn’t attempt to separate broadband from local connectivity problems, since consumers can sometimes wrongfully blame their ISP for problems that could be caused by factors outside the provider’s control (e.g. slow WiFi, power cuts, local network congestion, local network/router configuration problems, third-party device errors etc.).
Suffice to say that opinion surveys like this don’t always tell the whole story and would probably need to be significantly larger to catch a strong enough sample size for each city, as well as each ISP, in order to deliver a truly useful result. Sadly, the survey doesn’t show us how big the sample sizes were for each ISP and city, but we wouldn’t be surprised if some locations and providers only had a fairly small pool of responses.
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In terms of the results for ISPs. Utility Warehouse (UW) came top, with some 93% of respondents saying they hadn’t experienced any outages or at least couldn’t remember having experienced one. However, at the other end of the scale, Cuckoo sat at the bottom on a figure of 12%. But as we said before for cities, you’d really need a much bigger minimum sample size per provider to really do this kind of survey justice. Take with the usual pinch of salt.
Top 29 Best and Worst Cities for Broadband Reliability
| Rank | City | People with zero outages | Score |
| 1 | Gloucester | 0.92 | 91.2 |
| 2 | Wolverhampton | 0.86 | 83.1 |
| 3 | Worcester | 0.83 | 80.9 |
| 4 | Oxford | 0.84 | 80.6 |
| 5 | Sheffield | 0.83 | 79.2 |
| 6 | Wrexham | 0.82 | 79.1 |
| 7 | Norwich | 0.81 | 76.4 |
| 8 | Leicester | 0.79 | 73.8 |
| 9 | Leeds | 0.79 | 73.6 |
| 10 | Southampton | 0.81 | 72.7 |
| 11 | Cardiff | 0.76 | 70.4 |
| 12 | York | 0.76 | 69.4 |
| 13 | Newcastle | 0.76 | 68.5 |
| 14 | Swansea | 0.74 | 66.5 |
| 15 | Birmingham | 0.74 | 66.2 |
| 16 | Liverpool | 0.72 | 65.6 |
| 17 | Cambridge | 0.76 | 64.5 |
| 18 | Plymouth | 0.71 | 64 |
| 19 | Bristol | 0.73 | 62.7 |
| 20 | Edinburgh | 0.71 | 59.6 |
| 21 | Portsmouth | 0.74 | 59.5 |
| 22 | Aberdeen | 0.63 | 58.42 |
| 23 | Manchester | 0.63 | 52.43 |
| 24 | Chelmsford | 0.63 | 51.91 |
| 25 | Coventry | 0.67 | 51.63 |
| 26 | Brighton and Hove | 0.64 | 49.24 |
| 27 | Glasgow | 0.64 | 44.11 |
| 28 | London | 0.55 | 42.21 |
| 29 | Belfast | 0.49 | 39.74 |
Top 21 Best and Worst ISPs for Broadband Reliability
| Rank | Internet Provider | People with zero outages | 1+ outages | 4+ outages | 7+ outages | 10+ outages | Score |
| 1 | Utility Warehouse | 93% | 7% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 92.14 |
| 2 | BT | 81% | 19% | 5% | 2% | 1% | 75.28 |
| 3 | TalkTalk | 77% | 23% | 5% | 2% | 2% | 69.47 |
| 4 | Plusnet | 72% | 28% | 7% | 1% | 0% | 65.26 |
| 5 | Virgin Media | 70% | 30% | 7% | 3% | 2% | 60.42 |
| 6 | Sky Broadband | 69% | 31% | 9% | 3% | 1% | 59.61 |
| 7 | CommunityFibre | 69% | 31% | 14% | 8% | 3% | 52.22 |
| 8 | NOW TV / Broadband | 62% | 38% | 16% | 0% | 0% | 51.75 |
| 9 | Hyperoptic | 65% | 35% | 17% | 4% | 0% | 51.74 |
| 10 | Vodafone | 63% | 37% | 12% | 3% | 1% | 50.96 |
| 11 | EE | 60% | 40% | 13% | 2% | 0% | 49.12 |
| 12 | Youfibre | 60% | 40% | 23% | 3% | 0% | 44.33 |
| 13 | Zen Internet | 53% | 47% | 20% | 2% | 0% | 39.11 |
| 14 | KCOM | 46% | 54% | 15% | 3% | 0% | 32.82 |
| 15 | Origin Broadband | 53% | 47% | 29% | 5% | 0% | 32.63 |
| 16 | Trooli | 47% | 53% | 24% | 12% | 0% | 24.12 |
| 17 | Three UK Broadband | 40% | 60% | 25% | 4% | 0% | 21.27 |
| 18 | Direct Save Telecom | 32% | 68% | 21% | 0% | 0% | 16.32 |
| 19 | Gigaclear | 30% | 70% | 30% | 5% | 0% | 7.5 |
| 20 | BeFibre | 20% | 80% | 30% | 3% | 0% | -2.33 |
| 21 | Cuckoo | 12% | 88% | 47% | 12% | 0% | -24.12 |
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, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Utility Warehouse, an MLM business, comes top of a survey. This happens pretty often yet objective data despite this and their very high review scores don’t reflect their apparently superior quality. How strange.
Exactly, like I’m not going to break an NDA but I can assure you the % there is deff reported wrong. And this is from first hand knowledge.
Whoop, go Gloucester! I’m there with A&A on copper, and experienced zero outages indeed (beyond planned overnight maintenance, which basically just meant the odd re-connect). They even spotted a degraded line issue before I did, and sent Openreach out to fix it the next day. Can’t get better than that, at least while the endless wait for fibre goes on…
Reliability or perceived reliability ? Or perhaps even propensity to take a survey (which will naturally favor those who are evangelising a given network, or those with an axe to grind)
I no longer give any poll with less than a few million respondents any credit whatsoever, it’s like the nonsense polls from YouGov every week that claim all kinds of false statements and you find out 2000 people replied
Not even worth reading
Mr Maddox: meet maths. As long as the respondents are a representative sample 2000 is fine. Try the links at the bottom.
This one looks like it’s not weighted to make it representative, is subjective while trying to present objective data and sample size for each ISP is not going to be adequate. Also an incentive for some to be more flattering about their ISP than others.
https://uk.surveymonkey.com/mp/margin-of-error-calculator/
https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/resources/calculators/margin-of-error-calculator
the major polling companies have long proven that with a well selected sample, a few thousand respondents does provide reasonable accuracy. they do this stuff day in day out.
however in this case I would certainly be skeptical – no polling firm seems to have been involved and the number 1 ISP ranks ahead of the supplier(s) that actually provide the underlying service? yeah sure bud.
I am truly astounded Yayzi hasn’t made the list of outages. How bad must those 21 be for Yayzi to not make that list… They might be the cheapest and offer the best speeds. But my God do they have a lot of major outages that take days to fix.
What a load of horse manure.
A gentle reminder that many people think that if they go out of WiFi range their internet is down.
Polish Poler hits the nail on the head about how nonsensical this “data” is.
Widely reported that Community Fibre’s entire network went offline only last month for many hours yet apparently 69% of customers had no outages?
Something seems a little off about the validity of this data…