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ADSL Guide's aggregation of more than 60,000 readers' customer service, reliability and speed ratings shows that only the cable provider NTL Telewest managed to maintain the same level of satisfaction between April and September 2006.

The rating for BT Retail, which has a third of the DSL market, slumped by nine per cent, although not by as much as PlusNet, down 10 per cent, Talk Talk, 12 per cent and Pipex and Virgin, 14 per cent. The other leading providers did slightly better, although AOL, Orange and Tiscali all saw their ratings fall by four or five per cent.

In the second survey, of 15,000 phone and Internet users by price comparison website uSwitch, some ISPs fared better, notably Virgin, AOL, BT and Tiscali, while other fared significantly worse, notably PlusNet.

There are mitigating factors, particularly for smaller ISPs, not least the fact that rapid fall in broadband prices has forced them to cut costs while the consequent surge in subscriber numbers - 650,00 new users since March - has put more pressure on both the infrastructure and support services.

'The majority of providers are failing to accompany the growth in customer numbers with sufficient growth in customer

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service operations,' said uSwitch's head of communications Steve Weller.

ADSL Guide notes that falling prices has lead many ISPs to outsource support services in an effort to lower its costs.

'When these are moved outside of the UK, a lot of knowledge is immediately lost as call centre staff can no longer relate to the customers' issues in the same way from their own experience of broadband at home,' the website says.

There have also been problems with BT's implementation of its Max service and with the migration of broadband users to LLU-based services. BT Wholesale has said that these issues are being addressed.

PlusNet's marketing manager Brian Trevaskiss told this website that the survey's findings were not surprising. The ISP expects changes it has made in the last two months to make a positive difference to its service levels and it will be keeping a close eye on the next ADSL Guide and uSwitch surveys.

'We're not surprised and are of course disappointed, we've had some major incidents in the last six months and we've done a great deal of work to prevent them happening again,' he said. 'Given the background of these problems our performance in the survey is still above many others. We believe the results indicate broadband consumers are seeing so called "free" broadband services for what they really are.'

Trevaskiss added that it has experienced unexpected problems from its take-up of LLU wholesale products and free upgrade of 80,000 customers to rate adaptive, up-to-8Mbps ADSL services.

'Both these processes have returned higher fault rates than were seen in pre-launch trials,' he said.