Expert Reviews Broadband Awards 2026: The results

The results are in: these are the best broadband providers in the UK, according to our customer survey
Written By Expert Reviews Staff
Updated on 26 February 2026

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The widespread availability of full-fibre broadband might lull you into a false sense of security. With most people able to get speeds far faster than they actually need, does it really matter which provider you go with anymore? The results of the Expert Reviews Best Broadband Awards 2026 prove conclusively that it does. 

It’s not only speed that matters when choosing a broadband provider. Other factors such as value, customer service and reliability are equally important, especially on those frustrating occasions when something goes wrong with your connection.

This year’s Expert Reviews Broadband Awards include more categories than ever before. In addition to the speed, value, reliability and customer service awards we’ve handed out in previous years, we’ve also got awards in 2026 for the most recommended provider, as well as the best for families, bundles and provider equipment. We’ve even gathered data on customer’s experiences when using their broadband for gaming, streaming and working from home.

This year’s survey covers seven of the biggest names in British broadband, with detailed ratings for BT Broadband, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband, Vodafone and more.

Below is a summary of the award winners in each of our 12 award categories, but if you’re thinking of making the move to a new provider, you’ll want to check out our in-depth reviews of each of the seven, where you can find out precisely what tariffs they have on offer and the full details of how they performed in this year’s survey. 

Winner: Vodafone

Vodafone takes our crown for the second year in a row with a strong performance across the board. 

Speed has become one of Vodafone’s strong points, with the company offering some of the fastest connection speeds in the country and more than 90% of Vodafone customers happy with the speeds they’re receiving.

Vodafone doesn’t make customers pay through the nose for this top performance, either. Its tariffs are among the cheapest you’ll find from the seven providers in this year’s survey and almost 90% of Vodafone customers are happy with the value they’re receiving.

Highly commended: Plusnet

Value is definitely the trump suit for our runner-up, Plusnet. It doesn’t offer the ultrafast headline speeds you can get from other providers, but it does keep costs down, with tariffs starting from £23/mth at the time of writing.

An impressive 88% of the Plusnet customers we surveyed were happy with the value for money they got from the provider. That doesn’t come at the cost of customer service, either, with Plusnet topping the table in that award category, too.

Winner: Plusnet

This was the tightest category in this year’s awards with the thinnest of margins (0.15%, to be precise) between the top two providers, but Plusnet just edged out Vodafone to take the value crown.

One look at Plusnet’s tariffs will be sufficient to see why 88% of customers are satisfied with the value on offer – it’s among the cheapest providers out there. Of course, it’s only good value if the service is strong too, and Plusnet’s strong across-the-board scores reveal that this isn’t a company where cheap tariffs result in poor reliability or dire customer service.

Highly commended: Vodafone

Vodafone’s tariffs are also among the cheapest out there and, unlike Plusnet, it partners with CityFibre to offer some of the cheapest multi-gigagbit speeds on the market. Only 2% of the Vodafone customers we surveyed were unhappy with the value they were receiving.

Winner: Vodafone

Using a 0-10 likelihood scale, we asked our survey respondents to rate how likely they were to recommend their provider to others. In what was another very tightly contested category, Vodafone just nipped ahead of EE to claim the award. 

Both companies had almost the exact same percentage of Promoters – avid fans who scored themselves a 9 or 10 – and Detractors – unhappy customers who ranked 0-6. In the end, it came down to a difference of 0.39% that put Vodafone ahead.

Highly commended: EE

With almost identical numbers to Vodafone, EE only missed out on first place by a hair’s breadth.

The data tells a very intriguing story: this particular survey methodology considers a score of 50% or higher to be exceptional, and not one of the ISPs on trial here came close. At the bottom of the pile, TalkTalk had more negative respondents than positive ones, leaving it with a total score of -6%.

Winner: Plusnet

Good customer service is so important to broadband customers. In the vast majority of cases there’s little you can do as a customer if your broadband line goes down, so when you pick up the phone to report a fault, you want to know it’s going to be answered promptly and professionally.  In this regard, Plusnet is king. 

A tremendous 90% of Plusnet customers said they were satisfied or very satisfied with the level of customer service the provider offers, with only 3% left unimpressed. 

Highly commended: Vodafone

Vodafone, last year’s winner in this category, picks up a highly commended award for customer service. With 86% of its customers happy with the service, it’s the second successive signal that the company is doing a great job at looking after its customers.

Winner: BT Broadband

In this year’s survey we asked broadband customers if they used the parental controls that are supplied by their provider. Of the BT customers that answered yes, every single one of them were satisfied with them, making BT Broadband our best for families award winner.

Network-level parental controls apply to every device in the home that’s connected to the Wi-Fi. That means there’s no software to install or configuration to perform on the multitude of internet-connected devices in today’s home. While no set of parental controls is ever 100% effective, it’s clear parents are very happy with BT’s filters. 

Highly commended: Vodafone

Vodafone also performed very well in this category, picking up a highly commended award for a 97% satisfaction score from its customers. 

Both Plusnet and TalkTalk failed to achieve statistical significance here, disqualifying them from the category.

Winner: Vodafone

Speed has become less of an issue for broadband customers now that full-fibre connections offer the majority of customers more speed than they could wish for or need. 

However, if you’re a gamer, a busy household with multiple family members streaming at the same time, or you work from home, performance is still important. Vodafone romps home in this category, with more than 90% of its customers happy with the speeds they’re getting. 

Highly commended: Virgin Media

Virgin Media has long been renowned for the speed of its network. It simply doesn’t offer connections below 250Mbits/sec anymore. So it’s little wonder it picks up the Highly Commended gong here.

Winner: Plusnet

A fast connection is largely worthless if it’s constantly falling over. Full-fibre networks are inherently more reliable than the repurposed telephone networks we were using previously (and many still have), but there’s still a lot of work for broadband providers to do to keep connections stable. Plusnet is the best of the pack when it comes to reliability.

Plusnet had the best drop-out rate of any provider in our survey, which married with a very decent speed rating means it claims the top spot for reliability. 

Highly commended: Vodafone

It’s another Highly Commended award for Vodafone, who finished just above EE in terms of overall reliability. 

Winner: Vodafone

Bundle deals aren’t as popular as they once were, but it can often work out cheaper to get broadband, mobile, television and landline telephone (or any combination of the above) packaged together in the same deal.

We asked our survey respondents whether they took their broadband as part of a bundle deal and to rate the value, customer service and their likelihood to recommend if they did. The winner once again was Vodafone, which of course has a long pedigree in the mobile phone business. A healthy 89% of Vodafone customers were happy with the value of their bundle deal.

Highly commended: EE

EE was the runner-up in this category, with 88% of its customers happy with the value of their bundles.

Winner: Plusnet

The vast majority of broadband customers don’t buy their own router equipment, they use whatever is provided. That’s why we asked only those respondents who used the supplied router whether they were satisfied with its performance – and the results tell a very interesting tale.

The winner was Plusnet, who supplies the Plusnet Hub 2, a rebranded version of the BT Home Hub 2 supporting dual-band Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac). Though the tech-savvy among you will know that this is hardly the latest Wi-Fi standard – indeed, Wi-Fi 5 is two generations old – clearly Plusnet customers have no problem with the quality of the service they receive via the Hub 2.

Indeed, an exceptional 92% of Plusnet customers were happy with the equipment they were supplied. While our experts always recommend the latest Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 7 technology (as supplied by the likes of runner-up Vodafone), older standards perform perfectly well – and inevitably keep costs down for Plusnet, too.

Highly commended: Vodafone

Our overall favourite Vodafone came in very close behind here, achieving a 91% satisfaction score. It offers a mix of Wi-Fi 7, Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5 hardware to its customers. Sky also came within an inch of the top spots, losing out by a fraction of a percentage.

Winner: Vodafone

This category (and the two below it) was decided by asking customers to rate their experiences when using their broadband for specific tasks – in this case, streaming film or TV. We asked respondents to rate the speed and reliability (ie. the frequency of drop-outs) of their service, and averaged the results with a recommendation score for the specific use-case to produce a final figure. Due to the specific nature of these questions, two providers failed to reach significance – those being Plusnet and TalkTalk.

Here, Vodafone came out on top again, with 92% of customers happy with the speed of their service while streaming and 58% happy with the frequency of drop-outs. With a high likelihood to recommend, Vodafone averaged a score of 55% in this category, making it a clear winner.

Highly commended: EE

Following close behind Vodafone was EE. When asked, 84% of EE customers said they were happy with the speed of their service, and 63% happy with the frequency of drop-outs. Only a lower likelihood to recommend held EE back here.

Winner: Vodafone

We also asked respondents to rate the speed and reliability of their broadband service when gaming online – an essential metric, given the popularity of multiplayer games. Vodafone unsurprisingly took the win here, with an impressive 93% of customers happy with the speeds they experienced while gaming. 

Highly commended: EE

Yet again, EE follows close behind Vodafone, with 98% of customers happy with speed and 53% happy with reliability. Recommendation again held EE back.

Winner: EE

And finally, a more recent development in ubiquitous use-cases for broadband: working from home. EE managed to topple Vodafone in this category, with an average score of 55% over the three facets of this question (speed, reliability and recommendation) putting it 5% ahead of the leader this year.

Highly commended: Vodafone

Of course, Vodafone easily earned second place in this category, with a high speed satisfaction rating (82%) being let down by a lower drop-out score (47%) than EE.

Our survey, conducted in September 2025, targeted a representative sample of 1,544 UK residents aged 18 and over.  

Across 14 questions, our survey captured data on  8 broadband providers. To ensure the integrity of our analysis, we applied a minimum sample size of 50 respondents, which qualified 7 of these for analysis. 

Analysis Brands:BT, Sky, Virgin Media, Vodafone, Plusnet, TalkTalk, EE, Zen Internet

Eligibile brands: BT, Sky, Virgin Media, Vodafone, Plusnet, TalkTalk, EE

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