ISP Reviews by Ixel

I signed up to Zen a long time ago. At the time they were a great ISP, I never really had to make use of their customer service but thought it was always good.

Unfortunately after I believe a few years of service with them I must say farewell after my contract term is over. I've gone to another ISP on a second line who I've just posted a highly positive review about today.

Zen, last time I used my first line a few weeks ago, I was suffering with slow single threaded download speeds and intermittent packet loss blips. This was resolved at one point but then it returned to happening around peak times instead of all day long. I also had a problem with my FTTC service where on fastpath I was getting an excessive number of error seconds on the downstream. This remained unresolved, they booked me a voice engineer who found no fault. I should've had an SFI engineer (which the ISP I'm now with for the second line did, four times, until the problem looks to be cleared on the second line now).

I hate to say goodbye but later next year it will be officially goodbye from me, just waiting for my contract term to finish as it makes no sense paying an early termination charge for the full remainder contract value. I'm keeping the first line as an emergency backup for now.

I was originally with Zen but had issues with my first connection and line which were never really resolved. I decided enough was enough so ordered a second line from AAISP (SoHo::1 2TB on VDSL2) and a few weeks following the order the Openreach engineer installed it. My second line was on a new line card which had newer a ECI firmware (d086) and gave me a nice speed boost compared to my first line with Zen.

So, where to begin... lets start with customer service. Excellent! I had to make use of it initially before the order was installed. What happened was I wanted to try L2TP for a simple speed test over my problematic Zen connection but I didn't realise this would then make the system believe the line was installed. Understandably I was in a bit of panic so first thing the following morning I contacted AAISP to explain and was prepared to pay upcoming charges as long as the installation date was unaffected. Thankfully nothing was harmed and the upcoming charges were even cancelled!

After the service was installed I noticed that unfortunately this line was also suffering with a line issue (excessive error seconds on the downstream). On my Zen connection I was also suffering with slow single threaded download speeds and packet loss blips, where on the new AAISP connection it was fine. So anyway, I went to AAISP's IRC to ask if I should report this potential line issue even though the CIDT (PSTN) test was passing fine on the control panel. Shaun told me they should be able to help with this.

Four SFI engineers later and I think it’s resolve, I’m waiting on DLM at the moment to restore fastpath. This is the service I should've had from Zen. AAISP persisted and fought my corner! Thanks goes to Shaun and Stuart.

Even if the problem is still there, I'm still greatly appreciative of the efforts by AAISP to help me and after this experience I wouldn't dream of touching another ISP again. As I work from home a good internet connection is valuable to me.

As for everything else, control panel is very functional allowing me to do various things such as kill my connection, run a PSTN test (CIDT), traffic dump, change the downstream line rate percentage, MTU, etc. CQM graph is useful. Every detail about the order progress and the fault is reported on there too (e.g. engineer notes). Support and their IRC community are both friendly and helpful. Not had any buffering on iPlayer or Netflix or slow downloads unlike on my Zen connection. Yes, it's a bit expensive perhaps, but it's worth the price for sure.

I'll update this review if and when DLM returns fastpath or if anything changes in the future. I would’ve wrote more but there’s a 600 word limit, it was difficult deciding what to remove from my original review.

EDIT (09/11/17): Connection fully restored to fastpath and so far errors appear to be virtually non-existent.