BT vs Virgin Media: the best UK broadband provider in 2026

Virgin Media is the faster network. BT is the one that actually reaches you. That is the whole comparison in two sentences, and for most people it settles itself before they have read any further, because Virgin's cable runs past a bit over half the country and BT, riding the Openreach network, gets a line to almost every front door in Britain.

Where both turn up, the gap that used to decide this has mostly closed. Virgin is no longer the customer-service punchline it was for a decade. BT is no longer the expensive one you tolerate for a quiet life. They cost roughly the same, they put your bill up by roughly the same every April, and the thing that genuinely separates them now is whether Virgin has bothered to dig up your street.

So: pick Virgin Media if you want the fastest connection going or cheap gigabit and the cable reaches your address. Pick BT if it does not, or if you want the network that can be serviced by half the industry rather than one company. The rest of this is the working, in case you want to see it.

Virgin owns its network, which means it sets its own ceiling, and the ceiling is high. Its Gig1 tier runs at 1,130 Mbps across the old cable footprint, and on the newer full-fibre areas it now sells Gig2 at 2 Gbps, the first 2-gig residential product from a major UK provider. BT's fastest mainstream tier is Full Fibre 900, which lands at around 900 Mbps down. Quick enough that you will not notice the difference loading anything, but a number behind Virgin at the top, and behind at every tier below it too.

There is one asterisk worth reading. Virgin's gigabit download still comes with an upload of about 41 Mbps, because most of its network is cable, and cable was built to send things down to you faster than it sends things back. Full fibre is symmetrical, so a full-fibre gigabit gives you a gigabit up as well. That gap does nothing on a Netflix binge and quite a lot the day you try to push a large file the other way, which is most of the working-from-home crowd at some point in the week.

On reliability the two are level in everyday use. Both hold up at teatime when the whole street logs on at once, which was cable's old weak spot and no longer is. BT's full fibre tends to run a touch lower on latency, which matters to the household where someone plays ranked games and treats every dropped millisecond as a personal insult. For everything else, streaming, browsing, the Tuesday video call nobody wants to be on, the two are indistinguishable.

If you want to know which tier you actually need before you pay for headroom you will never use, the honest answer is usually less than the adverts suggest.

This is where the old version of this article is most out of date. For years Virgin was simply cheaper per megabit and the comparison ended there. It is not that simple now.

Virgin's Gig1 can be found around £23 a month on its own, which is a lot of speed for the money. BT's Full Fibre 900 sits in the low thirties, and its entry fibre tier around £28. Strip out the promo of the week and a Virgin gigabit line and a BT top-tier line now cost roughly the same as each other, both somewhere in the low thirties depending on when you look. The altnets undercut both, which is the part neither BT nor Virgin will mention.

Then there is the rise. Both providers will put your bill up every April. BT by £4 a month, Virgin by £4 a month, for anyone on a recent contract. The number is now printed in the contract in pounds and pence, because until Ofcom changed the rule the rise was hidden inside a formula tied to inflation, and not one customer in a hundred could tell you in March what they would be paying in May. Worth knowing exactly what the new rules let them do before you sign anything for two years.

Contract length used to be a Virgin point in this section. It is mostly gone. BT locks you in for 24 months and Virgin, which used to lean on shorter 18-month deals, has moved most of its base to 24 as well. If a short tie-in matters to you, neither of these two is where you will find it.

BT, over Openreach, reaches almost everywhere. About 98% of UK homes can get a superfast line through that network, and Openreach's full fibre had passed roughly 22.5 million premises by spring 2026, heading for 25 million by the end of the year. If you have a phone line, you can almost certainly have BT in some form. The same network is why, if BT annoys you, you can move to Sky or TalkTalk or one of forty others without an engineer touching the wall.

Virgin's network covers a bit over half the country, around 16 million homes, and it stops where the cable stops. In a town or city, decent odds it is there. In a village it tends to stop at the edge of the built-up bit, the way the bus route does, and there is no Openreach fallback because Virgin is a separate network entirely. It is expanding through a venture called nexfibre, building full fibre toward five million more homes by the end of 2026, with an aim of reaching about 80% of the country by 2028. That helps the village eventually. It does nothing for the village tonight.

The practical upshot is that for a large share of the country this comparison never happens, because only one of the two will give you a quote. The fastest way to end the argument is to put your postcode in and see who actually turns up.

For about ten years the safe thing to say here was that Virgin had the worst customer service in British broadband, generated the most complaints, and made you work hardest to reach a human. The first two of those are no longer true.

In Ofcom's most recent complaints figures, Virgin drew 7 broadband complaints per 100,000 customers. BT drew 9. The industry average was 8. The provider most complained about was not Virgin at all, it was EE, tied with TalkTalk and Vodafone. Virgin spent a decade as the punchline and then quietly became slightly better than average while nobody updated the headline.

This does not mean Virgin support is now a delight. Plenty of people still report long holds and the website's automated troubleshooting sending them in circles. It means the gap on service has closed to the point where it should not, on its own, decide this for you, which is the opposite of what every comparison of these two said until recently. BT remains solid and easy enough to reach. Both, like everyone in this market, will keep you company with hold music for longer than anyone enjoys.

On kit, Virgin is ahead of the BT brand. Its Hub 5 is a Wi-Fi 6 router with a 2.5-gigabit network port, sensible for the speeds it carries. BT-branded broadband still ships the Smart Hub 2, a Wi-Fi 5 router from 2018. The newer hardware, Wi-Fi 7 as standard, lives on the EE brand next door, which is the same company having decided EE is the premium label and BT is the steady one. If the router matters to you and you are set on this side of the fence, EE is the door to knock on, not BT.

On television, Virgin is the heavyweight. Its TV 360 box carries hundreds of channels including the Sky and TNT premium tiers, all in one place with a proper recorder, and the Volt bundle bolts on O2 mobile perks if you want one bill for everything. BT's TV, now under the EE name, is a more modest affair built on Freeview plus streamed premium channels, cheaper but smaller. If a big traditional telly package is the point, Virgin wins it comfortably. If you already get your viewing from apps, neither bundle is doing much for you.

Both throw in security software and parental controls, and neither requires a home phone line any more. Both include the router too. Charging extra for the box that makes the broadband work would be a stretch even for this industry.

BT and Virgin win on different things, which makes this easier than the marketing wants it to be. One sells you speed. The other sells you the fact that it can actually reach you.

Virgin is the pick for speed and for cheap gigabit. If you want the fastest line available, or a thousand-meg connection for around £23, and the cable reaches you, take it. Just know the upload is modest until full fibre arrives on your street, and that the customer service, while no longer the worst in the country, is not the reason you are choosing it.

BT is the pick for everywhere Virgin cannot reach, which is a lot of the country, and for the reassurance of a line half the industry can service if you fall out with whoever sold it to you. You pay a little for the breadth and you give up the very top speeds, most of which the average household never uses anyway.

The real verdict is that this is decided at your postcode more than in any paragraph here. Check who can actually serve your address, look at the live price rather than last year's, and if the bill you are on already looks steep, a minute settles whether you are paying over the odds.