I’ve heard a lot of candid reports about various UK ISPs, but these are usually based on a fairly strongly biased personal experience. I did get a general feeling that Virgin Media really weren’t very good, though, so I have employed some NLP techniques to perform objective analysis of people’s subjective opinions.

What I did was to count the number of pages on the net that Google is aware of which contain phrases in the form of “ISP is great” or “ISP sucks”. You can do this at home! This gives an idea of how much people like to express their opinions and what those opinions are when it comes to a particular internet service provider. However, this page count figure is misleading on its own – a company that has two million customers and treats the majority of them badly may still have many more positive reviews than a smaller ISP with only a few hundred customers that treats them all like queens and kings. So, we need to normalise somehow, and adjust the counts of pages that review ISPs to account for that ISP’s size. To manage this, I also counted occurences of phrases in the format “ISP review”, substituting ISP for the name of the company.

Results!

Company name Review mentions “… is shit” “… is great” “… suck”
O2 Broadband 11400 2 2390 1530
BT Broadband 21200 245 7 7990
Xilo Internet 130 0 0 0
Sky Broadband 15400 871 3090 6390
Virgin Media 6330 1990 853 992

Xilo aren’t popular enough to be comparable here. But what else can we see from this?

Well, for starters, 21% of the mentions reviewing O2 Broadband are about them being great – compared to 13% saying they suck. In fact, excluding Xilo, O2 are bottom of the suck league, and bottom of the shit league too. In fact, here I may begrudge them a compliment, and point out that evidence could be interpreted to suggest that they are are the greatest ISP in this comparison. Sky Broadband are a close second “is great” ISP, and also top “suck” ISP. What we can read from this is that Sky Broadband customers are more likely spend vast swathes of time on the internet vocally expressing their exaggerated opinions to anybody who’ll appear to listen. I’m sure we’ll all encountered them and formed fond memories of the occasion. BT Broadband are truly not a great ISP (0.03% of mentions say “BT Broadband is great”), bought into by customers who like a bit of a moan once in a while (second on the suck list, third on the shit list) – but will clearly never provide a positive remark. Daily Mail readers, perhaps?

Finally, the overwhelming kings of the shit list, based on this impartial evidence, are Virgin Media; 31.44% of their mentions are of their customers saying “Virgin Media are/is shit” – compared to the runner up, Sky Broadband, who despite their vocal customer base only hit 5.7% of  ”shit” reviews. Well done Virgin, keep up the good work. You saw the facts here first!

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