ISP Reviews by Leki

I signed up to Zen for phone line and fibre last month, Since I was with TalkTalk for fibre, Zen told me I had to first switch to Zen's ADSL and then they will put the fibre order through once that is live. So I went for the "Home Talk" line rental at £11.22 a month and "Zen Active" ADSL at £25.52 a month. I ordered on the phone and was told the total price would be £36.74. Once that was active the fibre order would go through for "Unlimited Fibre 2" and after a few weeks once that was live I would start paying £45.44 (Line rental £15.44 and fibre £30). On switch over day to ZEN ADSL from talktalk there were problems and I had no phone line or internet for 3 days. Once that was sorted they put my fibre order through and I confirmed with them the line rental price would be £15.44 for my 12 month contract as I ordered before they put the line rental price up to £15.98.

Zen then started sending me proformas charging me £15.98 for line rental for the time I was on ADSL with what was supposed to be the £11.22 line rental and for the future months fibre line rental instead of the correct £15.44. I tried replying to the emails from accounts on the 5th September but no one replied to them. I tried various other emails customerbilling and customerservices but they only bothered to reply once without properly answering my email or sorting the problem. After that they would not reply. Even tried the live chat but just got "all agents are busy" every time I tried it.

I signed up to ZEN because they are supposed to have a good reputation here and else where and I was sick of how bad TalkTalk were. Although TalkTalk's customer service is also bad at least I always got a ticket number and a response every time I emailed them. Sure TalkTalk's replies consisted mostly of random copy and pasted script and didn't sort out the problem most of the time but at least I actually got a reply!

Not happy with being lied to when ordering on the phone, emails ignored for nearly a month and over charged. I really expected better from ZEN.

So now I guess my only option is to go through the Alternative Dispute Resolution process.

If anyone is thinking of paying the extra to join ZEN then I have to say they are really not worth it, I really miss quality ISP's like "Be Un Limited".

If anyone is interested in seeing how TalkTalk compare with another ISP (bethere.co.uk) for the exact same ADSL2+ broadband service on the same line then i made a comparison of speeds, pings and customer service before i switched to TalkTalk.


In short:

BeThere.co.uk
Download speed: 950 KB/s
Upload speed: 135 kB/s
Pings to gaming servers: 11ms
P2P speeds: Always full speed
Customer Service: Great


Talktalk
Download speed: 690 KB/s
Upload speed: 98 kB/s
Pings to gaming servers: 34ms
P2P speeds: Sometimes came to a complete stop at peak times due to throttling
Customer Service: Terrible (see link below for more info on that)

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/talk/showthread.php/32261-The-difference-between-TalkTalk-and-BeThere-for-broadband