Opensignal 2025 Study Ranks Big UK Broadband ISPs by Quality and Speed

Internet connection testing firm Opensignal has today published their 2025 Fixed Broadband Experience report, which gauges the performance of major ISPs across the UK including BT (inc. EE), Sky Broadband, TalkTalk, Three UK, Virgin Media and Vodafone. Overall, Virgin Media scored wins in every single national connectivity category.

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 (on 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.

However, despite being focused on “fixed broadband“, the report also includes results from Three UK’s mobile broadband service, which makes for an interesting comparison but does muddy the traditional definition of “fixed“ services. The report also includes some limited data for “prominent regional altnet full-fibre challengers CommunityFibre, Hyperoptic, brsk and Plusnet“, although the latter has never been an alternative network (it should have been included alongside BT).

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. But needless to say that Virgin Media was named the winner for 2025 across all of these categories, and they lead by a particularly wide margin in areas such as Download Speed (187.8Mbps) and Reliability Experience (747 points). We’ve summarised some of the key results below.

Consistent Quality Score out of 100 (2024 Result in Brackets)

1. Virgin Media 81.6 (down from 90.4)
2. Vodafone 78.7 (down from 88.4)
3. BT + EE 74.6 (down from BT 86.6 – EE 83.1 )
4. TalkTalk 72.8 (down from 82.6)
5. Sky Broadband 70.7 (down from 76.9)
6. Three UK 62.6 (down from 72.3)

Average Download Speeds

1. Virgin Media 187.7Mbps (down from 157.4Mbps)
2. Vodafone 105Mbps (up from 77.5Mbps)
3. BT + EE 75.3Mbps (up from BT 62.0Mbps – EE 45.9Mbps)
4. Sky Broadband 70.4Mbps (up from 52.5Mbps)
5. Three UK 63.2Mbps (up from 54.8Mbps)
6. TalkTalk 55.1Mbps (up from 48.8Mbps)

Average Upload Speeds

1. Virgin Media 36.5Mbps
2. Vodafone 34.3Mbps
3. BT + EE 24.9Mbps
4. Sky Broadband 20Mbps
5. TalkTalk 19Mbps
6. Three UK 15.7Mbps

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. 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.

Despite this, it’s worth noting that Vodafone seem to now be the main national challenger for performance behind Virgin Media, which reflects the fact that they’re now much more FTTP focused than in the past and have key supplier agreements with Openreach, CityFibre and CommunityFibre.

The full results also include data from ten of the UK’s largest cities, which is where a number of alternative networks start to get mentioned. For example, in London, CommunityFibre tops the table with a download speed of 208.7Mbps and an upload speed of 164Mbps. But you’ll need to read the full report to get all the details.

London – Download Speeds (Mbps)
1. Community Fibre 208.7
2. Virgin Media 167.0
3. Hyperoptic 164.3
4. Three UK 78.9
5. Vodafone 72.5
6. BT (inc. EE) 64.7
7. Sky Broadband 57.7
8. TalkTalk 44.3