EE Broadband review: A premium provider that charges a little too much

EE is part of the BT empire, arguably the most important part. Its ability to knit together broadband and mobile deals makes it the flagship BT brand now.

Here we’re dealing with broadband alone and EE has no shortage of packages to tempt customers with, especially in full-fibre areas. All of its broadband packages come with a wide range of add-ons too, some of which are more worthwhile than others, in our opinion.

In our survey, EE performed well, finishing with almost the same overall score as stablemate Plusnet to leave the company in fourth place. Value for money and speed are its two strongest hands, and given that it’s offering 1.6Gbits/sec speeds that neither Plusnet or BT can match, you can see why it outshines its stablemates in that regard.

EE is by no means a bargain basement provider, so to score 81% satisfaction on value for money is a decent score too. If you place its tariffs side by side with Plusnet, you’ll see they are a couple of pounds per month more expensive, but customers seem pleased with what they’re getting.

Let’s dive in to see what’s on offer.

EE Broadband review: Fibre 50 and 67 Essentials

Note: Prices were correct at the time of writing but are liable to change.

The Fibre Essentials tariffs are the fibre-to-the-cabinet offerings, for those who don’t yet have a full-fibre network running right to their door.

They’re a little on the pricey side. Plusnet offers the same grade of connection for £28, for example, and they’re part of the same parent company. It’s hard to recommend EE, therefore, if you’re just looking to cover the basics.

EE Broadband review: Full Fibre 150, 300, 500 and Gigabit

The full-fibre packages on offer from EE are more enticing. There’s a good range of speeds here with sensible steps in pricing between them. Labelling a package “Gigabit” (or 1,000Mbits/sec) when it’s only capable of 900Mbits/sec is cheeky, though.

All of these packages come with the Smart Hub Plus router, which is a Wi-Fi 6 device. If you want the cutting edge of Wi-Fi technology, you can select the Smart Hub Pro add-on that upgrades you to a Wi-Fi 7 router for £10/mth. However, unless you’ve got a lot of Wi-Fi 7 capable devices in the home (by no means a given), it’s questionable whether you’ll really feel the benefit of this expensive upgrade.

EE offers a host of other add-ons to the base packages. Smart Wi-Fi Plus provides an extender to try and snuff out Wi-Fi blackspots in your home for an extra £7/mth, while the confusingly similarly titled Wi-Fi Enhancer claims to boost activities such as gaming by giving devices such as consoles priority on the network and “finding the highest quality server available”. We’ve not tested this feature, but £5/mth for what used to be a standard router feature seems punchy.

There’s also an option to add a 4G backup for £7/mth, providing a fall back if the fibre connection dies. Again, that seems a steep fee for something you’d hope to only have to use very occasionally, but might appeal to home workers.

EE Broadband review: Busiest Home Bundle and Made For Gamers

EE also offers two premium full-fibre packages that are the only ones to hit download speeds of 1.6Gbits/sec.

The Busiest Home Bundle also includes the Smart Hub Pro Wi-Fi 7 router and Wi-Fi Enhancer, albeit for a hefty £70/mth. Made For Gamers includes all of the above, and throws in an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription, which allows you to download or stream a huge library of games for the Xbox or PC. That costs £15/mth in its own right, part justifying the £80/mth fee for Made For Gamers.

All of EE’s contracts can be paid over 12 months instead of 24 for an extra £5/mth.

EE Broadband review: Coverage

EE relies on the Openreach fibre network, which means just over half of UK residents can access the company’s Full Fibre plans and almost all of the rest will only have access to Fibre 50 or 67 Essentials.

Note that rivals such as Vodafone and Zen Internet have multiple fibre network partners, so might be able to offer faster speeds than EE in some areas.

EE Broadband review: Performance and customer satisfaction

Speed is certainly one of EE’s strongest cards. Not only does it offer connection speeds faster than its BT stablemates, but it has an 81% satisfaction rating in our survey, beaten only by Zen Internet and Vodafone.

Value for money is strong too, with 81% of customers happy with the value they received, placing fourth in that category.

Things start to go awry when it comes to customer service. A satisfaction score of 51% leaves EE languishing in mid-table. A 64% satisfaction score for reliability is also a middle-of-the-pack performance.

Still, there are no red flags when it comes to EE’s service, which is why it ends up fourth in our overall satisfaction rankings, only a slender margin behind Plusnet.

EE Broadband review: Verdict

EE certainly doesn’t leave its customers with much to complain about, scoring highly for speed and value for money. If EE could improve its customer service, it could well be in contention for awards this time next year.

Methodology

Unless otherwise stated, all figures are drawn from a comprehensive survey conducted by Expert Reviews in December 2024, targeting a representative sample of 2,162 UK residents aged 18 and over. This sample size allows for statistically significant analysis across eight internet service providers, ensuring confidence in the results.

The figures are derived from responses to six survey questions targeting value for money, speed, customer service and reliability. We then take an average of these scores to produce an overall satisfaction metric, which we use to name our winner and runner-up.