Zen Internet

I live on the west of the Isle of Skye, not an area noted for fast broadband connections. Nevertheless when my little exchange got ADSL Max I signed with Zen Internet a company I had been with before moving here from Rochdale.
Just now the BBmax speedtest gave me 6.941Mbit download and 210kbit upload with 89ms ping.
My download speeds are consistently higher than 5.5. Not bad for the Scottish outback.
I also have hosting with Zen which has been faultless and easy. Their support is first class on the phone on the rare occasions when there has been a problem. The only connection problem I ever had was comprehensively investigated and the problem finally (and I'm sure correctly) determined as snow on the microwave link to my exchange!

As an IT professional, I work and do support from home. My wife and me are also big online gamers. Therefore when going for an ISP I went for realiability as my top most quality.

My broadband previously was with NTL (Virgin) via cable and let me tell you never, ever again. Numerous outages, frequent disconnects and terrible customer/technical support.

So I did some research reading forums and reviews of all the ISPs and I decided to go for Zen because everyone had mentioned its realiability as being excellent. I have been with them now 3 years and its true, you don't notice them being there which is a great advert for their services.

There will always be someone who will have a bad experience with Zen. But I bet you will find it to be a very small percentage.

I will breakdown the points I have awarded for Zen:

Services = 10, its reliable. I am on Zen Active and the cap suits me fine.

Support = 9, only thing is that its not 24/7. The times I have dealt with support they have been reasonable in getting back to me. I do IT support myself so I am aware what constitutes a good service.

Speed = 10, have no issues with the speeds I have. As a online gamer I am well aware that most online performance issues are PC related or game server related.

Value = 8, It is expensive and no one is arguing with that, you can get a similiar deal with another ISP at half the price. But as most people have stated, you get what you pay for.

It's funny if you look at the Top 10 on this website, you will see Zen Internet is on both lists, a large user base and still highly rated??? I wonder why that is.

I have been with Zen since may 2003 and generally find them ok.

But raising a fault is a bit hit and miss. My usage of broadband has increased from about 5gb a month to around 25gb a month, this is mainly due to streaming video and high bandwidth websites.

I have been migrated to the 21cn service which has reduced the reliability of the service with regular shifts in adsl line speed.

January and February of this year ( 2010 ) my line rate varied from 500 to 5000.

0 4000 4544 adsl4000 Auto 26-Feb-2010 13:19
448 5000 5696 adsl5000 Auto 23-Feb-2010 10:30
0 4000 4544 adsl4000 Auto 21-Feb-2010 10:10
448 5000 5696 adsl5000 Auto 13-Feb-2010 10:24
0 500 576 adsl500 Auto 12-Feb-2010 06:53
0 3500 4000 adsl3500 Auto 12-Feb-2010 06:25
0 4000 4544 adsl4000 Auto 11-Feb-2010 17:41
0 4500 5120 adsl4500 Auto 11-Feb-2010 17:21
448 5000 5696 adsl5000 Auto 27-Jan-2010 17:20
448 4500 5120 adsl4500 Auto 03-Jan-2010 00:00


Trying to get to the reason, its all over the place since moving to 21cn ( but not adsl 2+) seems to be impossible and the support staff demand that I remove the face plate of the the socket, place a filter in the test socket and place a new router on the line.

This does not seem to help and Im looking to migrate, to a provider that can work something out and improve the stability of the line.

Zen dont have a regrade to adsl 2+ option for my exchange

( update)
I dont accept that three different routers that I have bought and tried on the line are all faulty.


I need a bit more bandwidth for my money too and have decided to migrate, its a shame that over seven years of membership is nothing to Zen and they let me go with barely a word. MAC code given to another provider, should be on line with them next week ( march 2010).

User churn is accepted, without any attempt in retention.

I have been with Zen Internet for 4 years now. Since my first nightmare with BT when broadband started taking off in the UK, I never went for a big name broadband supplier again. Was with Demon for a while and their foreign support helpdesk was pathetic when something went wrong. Went to Zen for business and residential broadband thinking any company offering a 1 month rolling contract must have high standards and so far I have been proven correct. Zen might be more expensive and less value than some other ISPs but you get what you pay for with Zen. Customer service actually knows what is going on with orders and technical side of things. Super friendly. I thought the usage cap might be an issue but in 4 years it never has been. Highly recommended with support and company based in the UK.

I have just switched to Zen after having been with Orange since Freeserve days. What a difference! My connection to Orange was laggy and throttled, my new connection with Zen is uniformly fast no matter what time of day.

I am getting rock solid 6.5mg downloads constantly with a low ping to server, my gaming experience which was awful with Orange is now an absolute joy with Zen. This coupled with the fact of polite knowlegeable British based customer support staff, makes me wonder why I left it so long to change.

I cannot praise them highly enough!