ISP Reviews by E_J66

Tried BT Business again hoping they'd improved. What an error of judgement. Swerve them if you're considering it.

Easy to get through to business sales. Spoke to a pleasant lady. Order submitted and requests noted; two of which were 1) we don't need a router 2) we don't need phones. Agreed these wouldn't be sent and the postage charges voided.

When the confirmation emails arrived the whole order was clearly not what we'd discussed. I tried calling back sales, but they couldn't help as it was an existing order. After spending more than 3hrs trying to correct the billing and service addresses I lost all confidence and decided to cancel. BT had no idea what they were talking about, it was extremely poor. Their systems are far too complex.

I couldn't cancel via normal channels so raised a complaint. Everything was another teams responsibility, I had to speak with them. The complaints handler persistently wanted to close the complaint before anything had been resolved. I eventually ended up with three complaints, although this was not my intention and only confused things further.

A day later and account closure confirmed. BT sill tried to bill me. Had to raise another complaint to get this resolved. They still sent phones (to the wrong address) and demanded them back ASAP at our cost. They really dragged things out.

In conclusion, they are no better. Use another ISP.

Having used AAISP at multiple rural sites I would consider them one of the elite ISPs. Yes they're more expensive than your budget provider, but you get what you pay for. If you have a problem they'll promptly do what they can to resolve it.

Have we had faults and downtime, yes, plenty. The vast majority due to the ageing Openreach copper network. For this A&A provide bonding. While a fault on one line is resolved you can keep working. Even inherited complex faults have eventually been resolved by A&A thanks to their comprehensive line monitoring and persistence with Openreach. All without having to chase them or spend ages trying to get through to someone for updates. They provide effective, prompt, support via email as well as phone.

Paying for simple can be absolutely worth it when a service is important to your ability to conduct business.

A&A aren't for everyone but I'd have wasted a lot more of my life if they didn't exist.

We are heavy users so opted for 1000/115 from Zen Business. We ran this alongside another full fibre connection.

We had issues with Zen from the beginning. Our activation date came and went, but nothing worked (existing ONT). Zen support couldn't sort it so an Openreach engineer was booked and got the Zen connection on-line.

The connection consistently underperformed. The best achievable throughput was never more than a third the package download speed. Initially Zen were up against Openreach and their COVID restrictions. This caused significant undue delays.

After a few confused engineer visits Openreach eventually demonstrated the physical connection was okay and the issue was with Zen. Given our other FTTP connection (from a different ISP) always worked to pretty much the full 1000Mbps download this didn't come as a surprise.

Zen support were mediocre and certainly not industry leading. Sometimes weeks between replies but polite, if at times unhelpful.

We paid a premium to an ISP who were supposed to be highly rated. We didn't receive the purchased service. Zen had a year to sort it and didn't. They consistently advised there was no issues with their network, it was a BT problem despite Openreach proving otherwise.

We migrated that connection to 1000/115 with another ISP and amazingly we're getting good speeds... on the same fibre, same ONT and same router.