Virgin Media UK’s best broadband provider

Virgin Media has just been announced as being the UK’s best broadband provider.

Celebrations are underway after the annual home broadband survey has revealed Virgin Media as the top rated broadband provider for 2016.

The survey, which was held by broadband comparison site Broadband Genie, had Virgin scoring highest for reliability and speed satisfaction in addition to the fastest download speed with an average of 46Mb.

Previous survey winner Plusnet received accolades for most recommended and best value, while Sky won in the customer care and technical support categories.

Also winning an award was BT, which had the highest rated home Wi-Fi router.

Rob Hilborn, Head of Strategy for Broadband Genie, says:

This has been the closest year yet, but Virgin deservedly took the overall award with strong scores across all key categories. The good news for consumers is that Virgin has made the well overdue announcement that it will be expanding its service to nearly 17 million premises over the next few years, giving even more homes and businesses access to its superfast network.”

Last year’s high profile hacking of TalkTalk has done a lot of reputational damage to the company, and somewhat unsurprisingly this seems to have had an impact on its performance in the survey.

Only 60% say they would recommend TalkTalk to their friends and family, whilst its satisfaction scores for speed, customer care and tech support were drastically lower than other providers.

As a Talk Talk customer at the moment I can confirm that the speed and connectivity has noticeably decreased since I signed up a year ago. I for one am looking forward to my subscription period ending.

Broadband Genie also put together a judging panel made up of industry experts and insiders who were asked to nominate ISPs and services for awards in several categories. The panel includes:

Jasmine Birtles, Founder of Moneymagpie; Matt Egan, Editorial Director at tech media company IDG UK; Matthew Evans, CEO of the Broadband Stakeholder Group; Tom Fellows; Sales Director at Spitfire; Rob Hilborn, Head of Strategy at Broadband Genie and Alex Scroxton, Networking Editor at Computer Weekly.

For the first time, newly rebranded Fuel Broadband was voted best budget provider. Sky picked up an award for the best bundled provider. London based 4G mobile broadband provider Relish was chosen for the innovation award, and popular global streaming service Netflix was selected as the best streaming TV service. Finally, long standing catch-up service BBC iPlayer was given the best catch-up service award.

Matthew Evans, CEO of the Broadband Stakeholder group, stated:

This year’s result show how fierce the competition is in the broadband market at the moment. Clearly customers are looking for high quality of experience when using their connection, coupled with strong customer support for when things do go wrong.”

Does this match your experience with any of the providers mentioned?

Who else is planning to jump ship from Talk Talk, if you haven’t already done so?

Broadband Genie collected 7,948,513 speed test results with its broadband speed check partner. The results are as follows:

1. Virgin Media 46.32Mb/s

2. BT 21.99Mb/s

3. Zen 19.84Mb/s

4. PlusNet 17.39Mb/s

5. Eclipse 15.47Mb/s

6. TalkTalk 15.39Mb/s

7. Tiscali 14.26Mb/s

8. Sky 13.49Mb/s

9. EE 13.04Mb/s

10. BE 12.04Mb/s

11. Demon 10.39Mb/s