Let me start by saying Zen's ISP service is excellent - the speeds are as good as you'll get on your line, the network and peering are great and I never noticed any congestion or other issues on my connection while I was with them. There's also no content filtering or blocking, which is a bonus. You do, of course, pay for this privilege, a lot more than with other consumer ISPs. They're not quite up there with A&A in price, but they're getting there!

The problem with Zen came for me when I moved house. I placed a simultaneous provide order on my new line, so that my broadband would come online around the same time as the new phone line was installed. This didn't happen, so the next day I called Zen who made noises about "manual steps," "we need to call the helpdesk" and so on. (Note to Zen: please don't promise to call people back and then not bother!)

Eventually, after a couple of days of haranguing Zen for updates, I got my connection up and running - great! Until I got up the next morning to find no connection and an email from Zen about a cease. It turns out their "manual steps" had caused my service to be cancelled for no apparent reason and I would have had to have waited "five working days" (ie. a week) for a cease and reprovide. Since I was going to be ceased anyway, I decided to save money and cease and reprovide with a different ISP.

I'm not expecting the moon on a stick for £25 a month, and as a home user I'm not going to make a load of noise about "I can't work, I'm losing money". I can put up with a few days of delays in getting a new domestic service set up - but in the end, the price seemed a little excessive for the level of service I was getting and the balls-up over the cease sealed it. BT Retail activated me at 9am on the promised day and I'm happily online again and saving money.

There doesn't seem to be *that* much of a difference between Zen's expensive support people and the people on the cheaper ISPs - my experience with Zen was a whole lot of "such-and-such a person was dealing with you but he's out of the office," "this isn't the right department," "we'll call you back" and other such dodges. It's an okay service, but not worth the money.