Connectivity ISP

An Internet Service Provider (ISP) is, in the most basic terms, the supplier company that provides connectivity access to a building, be that commercial or domestic in use. As of January 2025, there were over 300 ISPs in the UK. This includes well-known brands, mid-sized providers and smaller alternative providers. Well-known brands include BT, Sky, Vodafone, Vorboss, Gnetwork and Virgin Media. The BT Group is the largest broadband provider in the UK with a customer base of 8.2 million, with a market share of 28.3% as of H2 2024. BT is made up of three retail brands, being BT, EE and Plusnet.

With the increasing demand from both commercial and domestic buildings to have access to high quality internet services, there has been an increase in the number of providers available. ISPs in the UK differ in their connection to the internet, the services they offer, and their reliability.

Connection to the internet

Tier 1 ISPs: Own or control their own portion of the internet, which makes them more reliable

Tier 2 ISPs: Lease bandwidth from Tier 1 ISPs

Tier 3 ISPs: Purchase IP transit from Tier 2 ISPs

ISPs may offer different connection types, such as CAT 6 cable, Fibre, DSL, Dial-up and Wireless. Tier 1 ISPs may be more expensive, but they are also often more reliable.

Decent broadband is described as having a download speed of at least 10Mbps and an upload speed of at least 1Mbps. However, suppliers in London like Vorboss offer 100GB speeds for commercial buildings.

Mbps: Megabits per second is a unit of measurement for internet speed. It measures how many bits of data are downloaded in one second

Gbps: Gigabits per second is another unit of measurement for internet speed. It's equal to 1,000 megabits per second