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Review: Quality ISP which lives up to the hype

Review: Zen is a quality ISP which lives up to the hype

This is the full version of my review that I posted here: www.ispreview.co.uk/review/reviews/6272.html

Zen proudly show off their Which? Broadband provider service awards, which they have been winning now for 18 years straight and I’m glad to say that they live up to the hype.

I’d previously been with BT (see previous review) was finally out of contract and was looking for a new ISP with better customer service when Zen started offering competitive broadband and phone deals for ADSL users like me (Openreach won’t upgrade the roadside cabinet) so switching to them for unlimited broadband and phone service became a no-brainer.

The signup process was smooth and trouble-free and I was sent various informative automated emails regarding the progress of my order as time went on. The broadband and phone services were due to start about a week apart (broadband first) on particular dates and the services went live without a hitch. The transition was so smooth, stress-free and perfect that it was completely underwhelming as you couldn’t tell the difference without checking!

I was especially impressed with the broadband transition as the line didn’t even lose line sync, something which I’d never experienced before when moving ISPs. In time, the download speed actually increased by a couple of megabits too, to almost 18Mb/s.

There is also no website censorship or any other filtering or fiddling of your internet connection, which is very important in this day and age of increasing government censorship over the flimsiest of excuses.

Oh and that quality customer service I’m so hot on.

After I had ordered my new service and was waiting for it to go live, I posted about it on the ISP Review forum, where a couple of friendly and helpful Zen reps were happy to help out with any queries I had, some of which I discussed in private messages.

Once the broadband service had gone live and was running for a couple of days, I called Zen’s UK tech support line to finally turn off interleaving on my line (see my BT review for their abject failure to achieve this). I had to just go through a couple of menus where an English tech support guy answered the phone within just a couple of rings – excellent.

He was obviously technically competent, unlike BT tech support, understanding what I was talking about when I said the magic words “interleaving” and “Fast Path”, promising that the change will take place within around 15 minutes. Well, I’m glad to say that it actually took only about three minutes to change. The router resynced and that was it, interleaving off, no glitches no messing around. I was able to verify it too, because my ping tests to various websites approximately halved. This experience was perfect and just how tech support should be, fast, straightforward, pleasant and stress-free.

I’m glad to say that my dual service with Zen has now been running for about a month and has been rock solid stable and reliable the whole time.

Zen has a great customer portal too. It shows your usage (even on an unlimited service) along with various other technical details about the line such as sync rate, download rate and history of every synchronization. The portal also allow me to do things such as change user profile settings, regrade my service, manage Zen email settings and check on order progress.

Zen is great for ADSL service and I look forward upgrading to their fibre product if the street cabinet is ever upgraded or I move to a house with fibre support. So now that Zen have competitive products for ADSL users like me, I can safely say that they are superb and easily the best ISP that I have ever been with, hence I rate them a solid 9.5/10.
 
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