Expert Reviews Best Broadband Awards 2023: The results

Broadband is now absolutely critical to our daily lives. Fast, reliable internet access is, these days, often a necessity for television, gaming, schoolwork and – much more so since the pandemic – working from home. When the broadband goes down, stress levels shoot up.

That’s why, every year, we ask you to give us your verdict on the speed, reliability, and customer service you receive from your broadband provider. A company can have the fastest lines at the cheapest prices, but if the connection is unstable and you can’t reach customer service when things go wrong, it means nothing.

Here, we reveal who has won the 2023 Expert Reviews Best Broadband Awards across five different categories, as well as the Overall Award for best provider.

We’ve asked you to rate your provider in terms of customer service, dealing with the contact centre, reliability, speed, and value for money. All of those results are then combined to decide an overall winner and highly commended provider. 

Here, you will find a summary of the award winners in each category. But if you want more details on an individual provider, as well as a full breakdown of all the different consumer broadband-only tariffs offered by that provider, then check out the eight in-depth reviews of the major broadband providers included in our survey.

Read on to find out which broadband providers you can trust to keep your home connected.

Expert Reviews Best Broadband Awards 2023

Overall winner: Plusnet

Highly commended: Now Broadband

Plusnet has emphatically claimed our top award for the second year running, giving the company a reassuring track record of success.

More than three quarters (78%) of the Plusnet customers we surveyed said they would be happy to recommend the BT-owned broadband provider, and if you look down our list of individual awards below, it’s easy to see why. It wins out for customer service, contact centre, and reliability, and scoops a highly commended award for reliability as well. In short, no other provider comes close to claiming Plusnet’s crown in 2023.

This year’s runner-up is Now Broadband, a company that delivers some of the cheapest broadband packages on the market. It might leave the fastest full-fibre connections to parent company Sky, but customers who don’t need these download speeds truly appreciate Now Broadband’s value for money and the quality of its customer contact centre.

More than 7/10 Now Broadband customers were happy with its value for money, helping it to scoop this award.

Read our full Plusnet review for more details

Read our full Now Broadband review for more details

Best Customer Service: Plusnet

Highly commended: EE

This category was a big success for the BT-owned providers Plusnet and EE.

Plusnet’s customer service scores are truly impressive, with 36% of customers declaring themselves “very satisfied” with the service, and a further 38% pegged as “fairly satisfied”. At the other end of the scale, only 1% of customers declared themselves “very dissatisfied” with the Sheffield-based provider – not bad when other providers had almost 10% of customers in this very unhappy camp. 

EE put on a strong showing, too. A third of its customers were “very satisfied” with customer service, with a further 38% declaring themselves to be “fairly satisfied”. EE does well when it comes to complaints to regulator Ofcom too, with an average of six complaints per 100,000 customers, well below the industry average of 11.

Read our full Plusnet review for more details

Read our full EE review for more details

Best Contact Centre: Plusnet

Highly commended: Now Broadband

This is a new category for our awards in 2023. We asked you to rate your interactions with the broadband providers’ contact centres, and once again it was Plusnet who emerged as the clear winner.

Just shy of half of Plusnet customers were left “very satisfied” after reaching out to the help team, with a further 32% “fairly satisfied” with the outcome. Fewer than 1/10  left unhappy.

Despite its cheap prices, Now Broadband’s contact centre is leaving customers impressed too. 7/10 customers were satisfied after contacting support, with only 8% left wanting more.

For context, the worst scoring provider in this category – Virgin Media – had a third of its customers leaving dissatisfied after interacting with the contact centre.

Read our full Plusnet review for more details

Read our full Now Broadband review for more details

Most reliable: Plusnet

Highly commended: TalkTalk

Reliability is arguably one of the most important qualities of a broadband connection. Nobody wants to spend their time troubleshooting a connection or waiting to get through to a call centre.

Plusnet once again proves its quality in this regard. A solid 83% of Plusnet customers were happy with the reliability of their connection, five percentage points more than any other provider.

The next most reliable provider was TalkTalk, with 78% of its customers satisfied with the stability of their connection.

This was a very closely fought category, with no provider earning a reliability score worse than 69%. A great showing all around.

Read our full Plusnet review for more details

Read our full TalkTalk review for more details

Best Value: Now Broadband

Highly commended: Plusnet

It’s hardly a surprise that Now Broadband’s customers are happy with the value for money they’re receiving. Not a single one of the company’s limited range of tariffs cost more than £22/mth. Several providers don’t have a tariff cheaper than that.

That stat is slightly skewed by the fact that Now Broadband is the only major provider here not to offer full-fibre connections. Nevertheless, well over 70% of Now Broadband’s customers are happy with the value for money they receive, comfortably earning the Sky-owned provider this award.

Plusnet pushes it close, earning a highly commended award. It’s notably cheaper than the other two BT-owned providers (BT Broadband and EE), and that’s reflected in a value for money satisfaction score of over 75% too.

Read our full Now Broadband review for more details

Read our full Plusnet review for more details

Best Speed: Virgin Media

Highly commended: BT

Virgin Media has long been the speed demon of British broadband. In the past year, its entire network has become gigabit-ready, meaning anyone within reach can get four-figure download speeds. It’s no shock, then, that 32% of Virgin Media customers declared themselves “very satisfied” with their connection speed, more than any other provider. A further 42% were “fairly satisfied”.

BT Broadband has started to offer gigabit speeds to its customers too, and that’s helped drag BT up the speed satisfaction table. A healthy 68% of its customers were satisfied with the speeds they received, which is impressive given the vast gamut of customers BT must serve in rural areas, as well as the major towns and cities where Virgin largely dwells.

Read our full Virgin Media review for more details

Read our full BT Broadband review for more details

Methodology

Unless otherwise stated, all of the figures are drawn from a survey commissioned by Expert Reviews, with respondents and data supplied by YouGov PLC. The total sample size was 4,253 adults and the survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all British adults (aged over 18).

We asked people how likely they would be to recommend their broadband provider to others and to rate its customer service, reliability, value, and speed. Only the eight ISPs with over 50 respondents are included in our results above.