New research from Broadband Genie, which surveyed 3,200 people across the UK, claims to have identified the best and worst cities, as well as internet providers, for broadband reliability. Overall, Gloucester was named as the best UK city for reliability (only 8% experienced outages last year), while Belfast (51%) was the worst.
The somewhat anecdotal survey asked participants how many outages they’ve experienced in the last year, where they live and who their broadband provider is. Using this, a reliability score out of 100 was calculated. One possible caveat here is that the survey didn’t attempt to separate broadband from local connectivity problems, since consumers can sometimes wrongfully blame their ISP for problems that could be caused by factors outside the provider’s control (e.g. slow WiFi, power cuts, local network congestion, local network/router configuration problems, third-party device errors etc.).
Suffice to say that opinion surveys like this don’t always tell the whole story and would probably need to be significantly larger to catch a strong enough sample size for each city, as well as each ISP, in order to deliver a truly useful result. Sadly, the survey doesn’t show us how big the sample sizes were for each ISP and city, but we wouldn’t be surprised if some locations and providers only had a fairly small pool of responses.
In terms of the results for ISPs. Utility Warehouse (UW) came top, with some 93% of respondents saying they hadn’t experienced any outages or at least couldn’t remember having experienced one. However, at the other end of the scale, Cuckoo sat at the bottom on a figure of 12%. But as we said before for cities, you’d really need a much bigger minimum sample size per provider to really do this kind of survey justice. Take with the usual pinch of salt.
Top 29 Best and Worst Cities for Broadband Reliability
| Rank | City | People with zero outages | Score |
| 1 | Gloucester | 0.92 | 91.2 |
| 2 | Wolverhampton | 0.86 | 83.1 |
| 3 | Worcester | 0.83 | 80.9 |
| 4 | Oxford | 0.84 | 80.6 |
| 5 | Sheffield | 0.83 | 79.2 |
| 6 | Wrexham | 0.82 | 79.1 |
| 7 | Norwich | 0.81 | 76.4 |
| 8 | Leicester | 0.79 | 73.8 |
| 9 | Leeds | 0.79 | 73.6 |
| 10 | Southampton | 0.81 | 72.7 |
| 11 | Cardiff | 0.76 | 70.4 |
| 12 | York | 0.76 | 69.4 |
| 13 | Newcastle | 0.76 | 68.5 |
| 14 | Swansea | 0.74 | 66.5 |
| 15 | Birmingham | 0.74 | 66.2 |
| 16 | Liverpool | 0.72 | 65.6 |
| 17 | Cambridge | 0.76 | 64.5 |
| 18 | Plymouth | 0.71 | 64 |
| 19 | Bristol | 0.73 | 62.7 |
| 20 | Edinburgh | 0.71 | 59.6 |
| 21 | Portsmouth | 0.74 | 59.5 |
| 22 | Aberdeen | 0.63 | 58.42 |
| 23 | Manchester | 0.63 | 52.43 |
| 24 | Chelmsford | 0.63 | 51.91 |
| 25 | Coventry | 0.67 | 51.63 |
| 26 | Brighton and Hove | 0.64 | 49.24 |
| 27 | Glasgow | 0.64 | 44.11 |
| 28 | London | 0.55 | 42.21 |
| 29 | Belfast | 0.49 | 39.74 |
Top 21 Best and Worst ISPs for Broadband Reliability
| Rank | Internet Provider | People with zero outages | 1+ outages | 4+ outages | 7+ outages | 10+ outages | Score |
| 1 | Utility Warehouse | 93% | 7% | 0% | 0% | 0% | 92.14 |
| 2 | BT | 81% | 19% | 5% | 2% | 1% | 75.28 |
| 3 | TalkTalk | 77% | 23% | 5% | 2% | 2% | 69.47 |
| 4 | Plusnet | 72% | 28% | 7% | 1% | 0% | 65.26 |
| 5 | Virgin Media | 70% | 30% | 7% | 3% | 2% | 60.42 |
| 6 | Sky Broadband | 69% | 31% | 9% | 3% | 1% | 59.61 |
| 7 | CommunityFibre | 69% | 31% | 14% | 8% | 3% | 52.22 |
| 8 | NOW TV / Broadband | 62% | 38% | 16% | 0% | 0% | 51.75 |
| 9 | Hyperoptic | 65% | 35% | 17% | 4% | 0% | 51.74 |
| 10 | Vodafone | 63% | 37% | 12% | 3% | 1% | 50.96 |
| 11 | EE | 60% | 40% | 13% | 2% | 0% | 49.12 |
| 12 | Youfibre | 60% | 40% | 23% | 3% | 0% | 44.33 |
| 13 | Zen Internet | 53% | 47% | 20% | 2% | 0% | 39.11 |
| 14 | KCOM | 46% | 54% | 15% | 3% | 0% | 32.82 |
| 15 | Origin Broadband | 53% | 47% | 29% | 5% | 0% | 32.63 |
| 16 | Trooli | 47% | 53% | 24% | 12% | 0% | 24.12 |
| 17 | Three UK Broadband | 40% | 60% | 25% | 4% | 0% | 21.27 |
| 18 | Direct Save Telecom | 32% | 68% | 21% | 0% | 0% | 16.32 |
| 19 | Gigaclear | 30% | 70% | 30% | 5% | 0% | 7.5 |
| 20 | BeFibre | 20% | 80% | 30% | 3% | 0% | -2.33 |
| 21 | Cuckoo | 12% | 88% | 47% | 12% | 0% | -24.12 |