Original article ISPreview UK:Read More
A new survey of more than 4,347 UK adults with a home broadband ISP contract, which was conducted between Dec 2024 and Jan 2025 by Which?, has claimed that 85% of respondents have experienced at least one “connection issue” in the past year (e.g. slow speeds, connection drop-outs, and router problems). Customers of Sky Broadband and Virgin Media were the worst hit.
The survey reveals that the top issue is still “slow downloads and uploads” (28%), which is confusingly followed by the samey “very slow speeds” (26%), frequent connection drop-outs (22%) and router problems (21%). Furthermore, some 15% said they had also lost internet connectivity for more than an hour and 8% said their connection had dropped for more than a day.
Apparently, Sky Broadband was the worst provider for “slow downloads and uploads“, with some 39% of their customers on the survey claiming that they frequently had problems. On the flip side, some 47% of Plusnet’s customers said they had NOT experienced slow downloads or uploads in the past year.
In addition, Sky Broadband were also found to be the worst provider for “very slow speeds“, with some 37% of their customers claiming to have frequently been affected by this. On the flip side, Zen Internet customers were least likely to suffer slow speeds (54% said they had NOT experienced this problem at all).
However, we aren’t quite sure why Which? opted to ask two questions about essentially the same thing (i.e. “slow downloads and uploads” vs “very slow speeds“) in their survey, which isn’t helped by the fact that the question isn’t well-defined and is highly subjective.
Finally, Virgin Media and Sky’s customers were also found to be the most likely to experience internet outages, with 22% on Virgin Media and 21% on Sky Broadband saying they had “frequently been left without their connection for more than an hour“. But we’ve no way to tell whether this was caused by the ISP or something else within the network, such as a local connectivity problem (router fault, weak WiFi signals etc.).
We should point out that not every person has the necessary skills to correctly identity and diagnose the cause of internet or network connection issues, which tends to result in all such gripes being levelled at the broadband provider. As usual, opinion surveys like this should always be taken with a pinch of salt, especially given the likely small sample sizes for ISP specific results. The fact that we only get partial and sporadic results for just four ISPs certainly doesn’t help.
However, we can speculate that one of the reasons why Sky might be suffering from so many speed issues is because they still have a sizeable base of ADSL and FTTC customers – connection types that often suffered from slow speeds due to signal degradation over distance on older copper lines. Providers with a higher proportion of FTTP customers should be seeing fewer disconnection events and speed issues.
At the same time it’s worth noting that, according to Ofcom, Sky Broadband tends to attract relatively few consumer complaints about their service (here).