Expert Reviews Broadband Awards 2025: The results

British broadband customers are increasingly spoilt for choice. The now widespread availability of competing full-fibre networks means we’ve never had such a range of speeds at such competitive prices before. The hard bit is choosing the right provider. That’s where the Expert Reviews Best Broadband Awards 2025 can help.

We’ve surveyed thousands of customers of eight of the country’s leading broadband providers, helping you to pick a provider that won’t have you griping about your speeds or on the phone to the support desk every other week. With first-hand insight from real customers, you can pick a broadband provider that best suits your needs.

This year’s Expert Reviews Broadband Awards are broken down into four categories: speed, reliability, value for money and customer service. We pick a winner and a highly commended provider from each category. We then combine those scores from the different categories to provide an overall winner and highly commended provider.

Our survey this year covers eight of Britain’s biggest broadband providers, including household names such as BT Broadband, Virgin Media, EE, Sky Broadband and more.

Below, you’ll find a summary of the award winners in every category, but if you’re considering switching to a new provider you’ll want to read our in-depth reviews of each of the eight, where you’ll find a detailed breakdown of the tariffs they offer, their coverage, and more details of how they scored in our survey.

With two-year contracts still very much the norm, you don’t want to make the wrong decision and find yourself chained to a sub-standard broadband provider. Read on to find out who deserves your custom.

Expert Reviews Broadband Awards 2025

Overall winner: Vodafone

Highly commended: Zen Internet

Vodafone has a long history as one of the country’s leading mobile networks, but it’s a standout performer when it comes to fixed-line broadband too.

The company takes our 2025 award with a strong set of scores right across the board, placing it just above our 2024 winner Zen Internet.

Vodafone picked up our customer service award with 62% of customers praising the company’s service. That’s only a thin slice more than Zen Internet, but enough to claim the gong.

Vodafone also picks up two highly commended awards for value for money and speed. A healthy 88% of Vodafone customers are satisfied with the value they’re getting, and when you look at the prices of the company’s many tariffs, you can see why. They’re fiercely competitive.

They’re not cutting corners on speed, either, with 86% of Vodafone customers happy with the speeds they’re receiving.

Reliability is by no means terrible, either, with Vodafone claiming third place in that category, meaning it finished in the top three of each of our four award categories.

Best speed

Winner: Zen Internet

Highly commended: Vodafone

Zen Internet claimed the 2025 speed crown with the single highest score of any provider in any category. A staggering 95% of Zen Internet customers said they’re satisfied with the speeds they’re getting, putting it way ahead of any other provider.

Zen not only supplies highly regarded router equipment, but it has deals with multiple networks, meaning it can offer faster full-fibre speeds in more areas than those providers (such as BT Broadband, Plusnet and EE) that rely solely on the Openreach network.

Vodafone uses multiple networks too, so it’s perhaps no surprise that it sits second in the speed table, with 86% of its customers praising the performance.

Best customer service

Winner: Vodafone

Highly commended: Zen Internet

There’s almost no point in having great speeds if the provider’s customer service is not up to scratch when something goes wrong. So it’s reassuring to see the two providers most highly rated for speed also claiming the gongs in this category.

This was by far the most closely fought category in the entire awards, with only fractions of a percentage point between winner Vodafone and highly commended Zen Internet. A total of 62.4% of Vodafone customers were happy with the service, compared to 61.9% of Zen customers.

Those two were some distance ahead of the pack, which doesn’t reflect particularly well on the entire industry. Three providers (BT Broadband, Virgin Media and TalkTalk) all failed to achieve customer service satisfaction scores greater than 50%. Less than a third of TalkTalk customers were satisfied.

Best value

Winner: Zen Internet

Highly commended: Vodafone

It speaks volumes when your customers rate you highly for value when you’re by no means the cheapest provider in the market.

Zen Internet claims the award this year, with 93% of the company’s customers happy with the value they’re getting for their monthly subscription fee.

Vodafone is not too far behind with an 88% satisfaction rating. It has some of the most competitively priced tariffs on the market and it has access to some of the fastest speeds, which is the winning combination that has propelled it to this year’s overall award.

Best reliability

Winner: Virgin Media

Highly commended: BT Broadband

This is the only category in which Vodafone and Zen Internet are not putting the awards in their trophy cabinets.

Virgin Media is unique in these awards, being the only company to have rolled out its own fibre network, whereas all the others rent fibre lines from other providers. Being able to directly control the entire customer connection appears to be paying dividends for Virgin, with 70% of its customers happy with the reliability of their network.

BT Broadband is arguably the most familiar brand in the entire broadband industry and it’s a brand you can seemingly rely on. Just over two thirds of BT Broadband customers are happy with the reliability of the service, placing the company just ahead of Vodafone.

This is the one category where Zen Internet didn’t fare well, recording a reliability satisfaction score of 42%.

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.