Methodology for broadband ratings

If you’ve browsed our broadband review pages you may have noticed that many of them feature star ratings at the top. They’re there to give you a quick indication of how good a broadband supplier’s service is and how it treats its customers.

To make sure everything is transparent, here we explain how we crunch the numbers to come up with the ratings.

We publish 2 types of star ratings:

Finder’s ratings

★★★★★ – Excellent

★★★★★ – Good

★★★★★ – Average

★★★★★ – Subpar

★★★★★ – Poor

How it works

To come up with our expert ratings, we score products across 6 key areas. Each contributes a different amount to the overall score.

• Is the firm signed up to Ofcom’s Automatic Compensation Scheme (5% of total score)? If the answer is yes, then we award the provider 5 points. If not, it gets zilch. We get this information from the telecoms regulator Ofcom directly.
• Overall satisfaction with service (35% of total score). This measures the proportion of a firm’s customers who are generally satisfied with the service they’re receiving. These figures are collected by Ofcom, which carries out a survey every year by polling 2,274 adults about their fixed-line broadband provider.
• Satisfaction with the speed of service (30% of total score). Taken from the same Ofcom survey, this is a measure of how happy customers are with the connection speeds they receive from their provider.
• Overall satisfaction with complaint handling (15% of total score). Out of those who made a complaint to their broadband firm in 2020, this is the proportion who felt their issue was resolved properly, according to Ofcom.
• Customers with a reason to complain (10% of total score). This score reflects the proportion of a provider’s customers who told Ofcom they needed to complain about an issue last year. The lower the number, the better the score.
• Proportion of orders delivered by agreed date (5% of total score). Once a customer agrees to switch suppliers, this score measures the proportion of orders delivered on time.
• Overall. Percentage scores are converted into a star rating, to the nearest half star.

Customer satisfaction ratings

★★★★★ – Excellent

★★★★★ – Good

★★★★★ – Average

★★★★★ – Subpar

★★★★★ – Poor

How it works

To get a quick snapshot of how customers rate their broadband supplier, the customer satisfaction rating is taken from the “Satisfaction with service overall” score that each company receives in Ofcom’s annual customer service survey. This percentage score is then converted into a star rating, rounded to the nearest half star.

Written by

Nick Renaud-Komiya

Writer

Nick Renaud-Komiya has been a writer and reporter for nine years, covering a range of consumer issues from energy suppliers to banking and mortgage issues. He enjoys helping people take control of their personal finances and better understand their consumer rights. Nick’s consumer writing and money journalism has been featured in a range of outlets including MoneySavingExpert.com, The Sunday Mirror, The Independent and Money.co.uk. Outside of work Nick enjoys cooking and collecting old David Bowie merch. See full bio