Expert Reviews Best Broadband Awards 2022: The results
Expert Reviews reveals the best British broadband provider, as voted for by you
The past couple of years have been tough, but they’ve also shown just how important broadband is to our everyday lives. Connections that were previously only used in the evenings and weekends suddenly had to contend with home working and homeschooling, as well as more streaming, gaming and video-calling than ever before.
With speed and reliability under the spotlight more than ever, your choice of broadband supplier has become absolutely critical. That’s where Expert Reviews comes in: we want to make sure you get the best broadband bang for your buck, with the high-quality customer service and rock-solid reliability you deserve.
Every year, we ask broadband customers to fill out a survey and let us know how their ISPs are performing. Thousands tell us about their customer service, reliability, speed and value and we hand out awards based on that honest feedback. Most importantly, we ask whether or not people would recommend their broadband provider to friends and family.
Below, we’ve summarised the results of our survey in each of the award sections, while providing links to our reviews of each ISP. Read on to find out which providers garnered the highest praise and are therefore worth your hard-earned cash.
READ NEXT: Our guide to the best broadband providers of 2022
Expert Reviews Best Broadband Awards 2022
Overall Winner: Plusnet
Highly commended: Sky
Sheffield-based Plusnet has emphatically scooped our top award this year, with a huge 73% of respondents saying they were highly likely (15%) or quite likely (58%) to recommend the service to people they know. Its results were strong across all of the other categories too, with 73% of people highly or quite satisfied with its customer service, 71% pleased with its reliability and 71% happy with the value for money it offers. Those are simply stellar scores that make the service very easy to recommend.
Second-place, and highly commended, Sky Broadband also performed well, with 63% of those surveyed highly likely (17%) or quite likely (46%) to recommend it to friends or families. Elsewhere, 61% of respondents sang the praises of its customer service, while a total of 75% who were very or quite satisfied with reliability is particularly impressive. Only 45% of you were pleased with its value for money, though.
But what about the other major ISPs? 61% of customers were overall likely to recommend BT and 57% would suggest signing up to TalkTalk, with Virgin Media and EE lagging behind on 55% and 54% respectively. At first glance, Vodafone’s tally of 68% should have bagged it the silver medal but concerns over its customer service (only 54% of respondents were satisfied) and its high level of Ofcom complaints (the worst of any ISP at 103 per 100,000 customers) undermined its charge.
Read our Plusnet review for more details
Read our Sky review for more details
Likelihood to recommend
Best Customer Service: Plusnet
Highly commended: EE
Overall winner, Plusnet, blew away the competition on customer service as well. A massive 73% of respondents were either very satisfied (33%) or quite satisfied (40%) with the customer support. A mere 3% were quite dissatisfied, while only 1% were very dissatisfied. If you’re after an ISP that’s quick to respond and sort out issues, look no further.
Plusnet’s score becomes even more impressive when you consider that EE finished in second place with 64%, while only 61% of people were very or quite satisfied with Sky’s service. Meanwhile, Vodafone gained 54% and BT finished with 53%. Bringing up the rear were TalkTalk and Virgin Media with lacklustre satisfaction ratings of 41% and 37% respectively.
Read our Plusnet review for more details
Read our EE review for more details
Customer service
Most Reliable: BT
Highly commended: Sky
It’s not a clean sweep for Plusnet in this year’s awards, though, with BT picking up the award for Most Reliable ISP, having been highly commended in 2021. A whopping 76% of customers are either very satisfied (33%) or quite satisfied (43%) with the solidity of its service, with only 8% being dissatisfied. That’s a credit to BT’s broadband infrastructure.
Sky once again finished as the runner-up, although only by a single percentage point. That’s impressive given it finished in the lower half of the table last year. The rest of the ISPs formed a closely-knit peloton, with 74% of customers being very or quite satisfied with Vodafone’s reliability, 71% with Plusnet’s, 70% with Virgin Media’s, 69% with TalkTalk’s and 61% with EE’s. However, we should flag that 20% of respondents were either quite dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the reliability of both EE and TalkTalk.
Read our BT review for more details
Read our Sky review for more details
Reliability
Best Value: Plusnet
Highly commended: Vodafone
Plusnet made mincemeat of its rivals in the Best Value category: a staggering 71% were either very satisfied (21%) or quite satisfied (50%) with the price of the service. What’s more, only 7% of its customers were quite dissatisfied with their plan’s value, while 1% were very dissatisfied. Those are impressive figures compared with Plusnet’s rivals, once again underlining that the service is a brilliant all-round choice.
Vodafone picked up the highly commended gong in this category, with an overall satisfaction level of 64%. Elsewhere, 58% of TalkTalk’s users were satisfied with their ISP’s value, while the rest of the pack were left in the dust: EE scored 46%, Sky posted 45%, BT finished on 39% and Virgin Media returned a disappointing total of 34%. To make things worse, a sizable 10% of Virgin Media’s customers were very dissatisfied with the firm’s value for money, more than double the rate of the other ISPs in our survey.
Read our Plusnet review for more details
Read our Vodafone review for more details
Value for money
Best Speed: Virgin Media
Highly commended: BT
Virgin Media’s broadband might not represent good value for money in the eyes of its customers, but there’s no arguing with its speed. Some 37% of respondents were very satisfied with the speed of their connection, while another 41% were quite satisfied. That overall total of 78% beat all comers by a country mile and it’s not difficult to see why: Virgin Media offers claimed average download speeds up to an astonishing 1,130Mbits/sec and an average upload rate of 52Mbits/sec.
Second-place came down to a photo finish between BT and Vodafone. Although Vodafone actually had a 3% higher overall satisfaction level at 73%, we couldn’t ignore the 30% of BT customers who were very satisfied compared with Vodafone’s 21%. There was little to separate the rest of the contenders with Sky finishing on 66%, TalkTalk on 65%, EE on 63% and Plusnet had its only slip-up on 61%.
Read our Virgin Media review for more details
Read our BT review for more details
Speed
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 2,033 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 seven ISPs with over 50 respondents are included in our results above.