Survey Claims to Reveal Who Pays the Most for UK Broadband Outages

New research from Broadband Genie, which surveyed 3,200 broadband bill payers from across the UK, claims to have found that 45% of broadband customers have experienced at least one connection outage lasting over 48 hours in the past 12 months – they’ve also calculated who pays the most for their outages by ISP, UK region and city.

The somewhat anecdotal survey essentially ranked respondents based on how many outages, lasting over 48 hours, they encountered for every £100 they spend on their broadband deal (a quirky metric for this kind of study and we’re not sure if it really tells us all that much). Broadband customers in Glasgow were found to encounter 0.94 outages lasting over 48 hours, followed by Belfast (0.57) and London (0.53), for every £100 customers spend.

On the flip side, customers in Gloucester experienced just 0.02 outages, the fewest outages for every £100 they spend, followed by Wolverhampton (0.07) and Wrexham (0.07). In terms of broadband providers, customers of Cuckoo were said to have experienced 1.48 outages for every £100 they spent, while customers of BT incurred the fewest outages (0.17). But take note that we aren’t told how big the sample sizes are for each ISP, although we suspect there won’t have been many results for Cuckoo (i.e. smaller providers may give a less reliable result).

In terms of the regional perspective, broadband customers in Scotland encountered 0.67 broadband outages, the most for every £100 they spend. Whereas, bill payers in Yorkshire and the Humber deal with just 0.15 outages for every £100 they spend. In Wales the figure is 0.22 and in Northern Ireland it’s 0.57.

Alex Tofts of Broadband Genie said: “No one should be paying over the odds for unreliable broadband. It’s unacceptable the number of outages customers are experiencing after spending hundreds of pounds on their broadband.” But we do have to consider that, on residential broadband services, protracted network outages are often localised and will impact customers regardless of how much you pay.

In addition, the survey doesn’t appear to separate broadband from other connectivity problems, since consumers can sometimes wrongfully blame their ISP for problems that could be caused by factors outside the internet provider’s direct control (e.g. slow WiFi, power cuts, local network congestion, local network/router configuration problems, third-party device errors etc.). Take this survey with the usual pinch of salt.

Equally, if you do want better reliability then it often requires paying more for a business connection with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) or, alternatively, ensuring you have a backup connection to hand (e.g. 4G/5G mobile broadband, Starlink or a second fixed fibre line etc.). Otherwise, the results can be found below.

Cities paying the most for broadband outages

Regions paying the most for broadband outages

The best and worst ISPs for outages and customer spend