Legless
Member
Bear with me - it's a long one but I'm at my wit's end now.
I've had Zen's FTTP 500 service since the beginning of last year, and I've been extremely happy with it to date.
Woke up on Friday morning though with no Internet at all. Checked the router, and the PPP connection had dropped at midnight and had been timing out ever since. Tried the usual things - power cycling, different Ethernet cables etc., with no effect. The ONT was reporting a steady green PON light with no LOS indicator. Plugged my laptop directly into the ONT and tried to open a PPPoE connection. It timed out.
Called Zen, explained all of the above to the call handler, and his first response was that he needed to check my router settings. At this point, I interrupted him and reminded him that I'd already taken the router out of the equation with the direct laptop -> ONT connection, which didn't inspire confidence that he'd actually been listening to me. I was then placed on hold for a few minutes for tests, and was told that these had come back clear. I was then asked to try some different diagnostic usernames/passwords on the PPPoE connection, but again these all timed out.
An Openreach visit was booked for the following day (today) and the call was ended. However, I checked my Zen account later that day and noticed an order in place for 'Zen FTTP GEA Migration', which was marked in-progress and 'a status of 'Wait for KCI-3 - IN PROGRESS FOR 15 HOURS', which coincidentally had been the exact amount of time my connection had been dropped. This seemed to be too much of a coincidence for me, so I just dropped an email asking for this to be investigated.
The Openreach engineer turned up at lunchtime today, and said he'd just spent 3 hours with another Zen customer on the next street with exactly the same problem and same timings. He'd managed to eliminate an issue with the customer equipment or the ONT connection back to the exchange, and had traced the issue (in his words, with much to-ing and fro-ing between his support team and Zen) due to a failure of the GEA migration on the account, and a switch from single-tagged VLAN to double-tagged VLAN. He said that it was entirely with Zen to resolve. He spent a few minutes with me validating that the end user symptoms were identical, and then he told me to let Zen know this.
I immediately got in touch with Zen, who told me that a fault manager would get back to me later today. I had an email from the fault manager earlier (and 10 mins before the end of the working day) that stated the following:
---
We have received engineer notes which reports no fault was found and the service was right when tested. The engineer reported there is a possible issue with the internal equipment.
Can you provide any details of the engineer visit and also confirm if you have tested an alternative router to rule this out? If test equipment is required please let us know and I will get this organised
---
Aside from being completely incorrect about the engineer visit, it doesn't seem as though it's been acknowledged that I've already run a number of tests with different equipment, and nobody seems to be investigating this GEA migration angle either.
It strongly feels like I'm being fobbed off until next week when somebody can actually be bothered to look into it.
I've had Zen's FTTP 500 service since the beginning of last year, and I've been extremely happy with it to date.
Woke up on Friday morning though with no Internet at all. Checked the router, and the PPP connection had dropped at midnight and had been timing out ever since. Tried the usual things - power cycling, different Ethernet cables etc., with no effect. The ONT was reporting a steady green PON light with no LOS indicator. Plugged my laptop directly into the ONT and tried to open a PPPoE connection. It timed out.
Called Zen, explained all of the above to the call handler, and his first response was that he needed to check my router settings. At this point, I interrupted him and reminded him that I'd already taken the router out of the equation with the direct laptop -> ONT connection, which didn't inspire confidence that he'd actually been listening to me. I was then placed on hold for a few minutes for tests, and was told that these had come back clear. I was then asked to try some different diagnostic usernames/passwords on the PPPoE connection, but again these all timed out.
An Openreach visit was booked for the following day (today) and the call was ended. However, I checked my Zen account later that day and noticed an order in place for 'Zen FTTP GEA Migration', which was marked in-progress and 'a status of 'Wait for KCI-3 - IN PROGRESS FOR 15 HOURS', which coincidentally had been the exact amount of time my connection had been dropped. This seemed to be too much of a coincidence for me, so I just dropped an email asking for this to be investigated.
The Openreach engineer turned up at lunchtime today, and said he'd just spent 3 hours with another Zen customer on the next street with exactly the same problem and same timings. He'd managed to eliminate an issue with the customer equipment or the ONT connection back to the exchange, and had traced the issue (in his words, with much to-ing and fro-ing between his support team and Zen) due to a failure of the GEA migration on the account, and a switch from single-tagged VLAN to double-tagged VLAN. He said that it was entirely with Zen to resolve. He spent a few minutes with me validating that the end user symptoms were identical, and then he told me to let Zen know this.
I immediately got in touch with Zen, who told me that a fault manager would get back to me later today. I had an email from the fault manager earlier (and 10 mins before the end of the working day) that stated the following:
---
We have received engineer notes which reports no fault was found and the service was right when tested. The engineer reported there is a possible issue with the internal equipment.
Can you provide any details of the engineer visit and also confirm if you have tested an alternative router to rule this out? If test equipment is required please let us know and I will get this organised
---
Aside from being completely incorrect about the engineer visit, it doesn't seem as though it's been acknowledged that I've already run a number of tests with different equipment, and nobody seems to be investigating this GEA migration angle either.
It strongly feels like I'm being fobbed off until next week when somebody can actually be bothered to look into it.























