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Zen Internet - What Are They Really Like?

@WKDRED
Are you referring here to "switching breaks" of just a few seconds, or longer duration outages?
How regularly do these occur?

I often have difficulty sleeping at night, so I'm often on my computer in the early hours of the morning. To have regular outages, (more than a few seconds), at that time would be an issue for me.
Should be a few seconds I imagine, time it takes for pppoe to terminate and reconnect. Assuming CPE handles it elegantly.

I also agree with Msh that the latency via Manchester will not affect mainstream usage, it was mentioned as I have got used to people moaning about it.
 
I was with Zen for several years until about 3 years ago. I had FTTC at at the end of a long, rotten mixed Cu/Al line. I never got more than 30Mb from it, and the faults on it were such that regularly DLM would start reducing the sync speed. When it got down to 15Mb, every 3 months or so, I would have to call up Zen support and get the DLM reset. When I first joined them it was possible to have sensible conversations with support, but latterly it was all people working from scripts, and I got very fed up with repeatedly going through the yes I have rebooted the router, no there isn't any house wiring connected, yes it is directly plugged in to the test socket routine, then waiting a week while they monitored the line and saw no improvement.

The other reason I left them was that SOGEA was relatively new at the time. Zen were offering it to new customers, but not existing customers. I wanted to convert my WLR line to SOGEA and port the voice to 3rd party VoIP, but they wouldn't offer me a sensible way to do that. They also wouldn't tell me what their own plans for digital voice were.

YMMV, of course.
 
Thanks again to everyone who has taken the time and trouble to reply so far - it is much appreciated.

One further question please:

When I read about copyright holders obtaining banning orders to force ISPs to prevent access to certain web sites for copyright infringement, the implication in the reports is that it only applies to the "larger ISPs" - which I take to mean those with more than a certain number of customers, eg BT (including Plusnet), Sky etc.

Do Zen get included in these banning orders?

Do Zen prevent access anyway when a website is banned as above?

TIA

.
 
Thanks again to everyone who has taken the time and trouble to reply so far - it is much appreciated.

One further question please:

When I read about copyright holders obtaining banning orders to force ISPs to prevent access to certain web sites for copyright infringement, the implication in the reports is that it only applies to the "larger ISPs" - which I take to mean those with more than a certain number of customers, eg BT (including Plusnet), Sky etc.

Do Zen get included in these banning orders?

Do Zen prevent access anyway when a website is banned as above?

TIA

.
I have Zen/CityFibre on the 300/300 package (which was actually provisioned at 300 down and 900 up, and has never been changed). The connection is fine. I don't live far from Manchester, so I like having the Manchester POP - connections to my workplace, for instance, go via Manchester and don't do the London round trip which improves latency marginally. Occasionally I get dumped onto the London POP after maintenance, but cycling the connection generally puts me back to Manchester.

I'm 3-4ms from 1.1.1.1, which in my case is located in Manchester. It's much better latency than I could get from any ISP that routes everything via London:

Code:
$ ping 1.1.1.1
PING 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=59 time=5.92 ms
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=59 time=3.76 ms
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=59 time=3.77 ms
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=59 time=3.65 ms
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=59 time=3.61 ms
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=59 time=3.81 ms
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=59 time=3.85 ms
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=59 time=3.83 ms
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=59 time=3.30 ms
64 bytes from 1.1.1.1: icmp_seq=10 ttl=59 time=3.46 ms

According to my FritzBox, my connection has been "up" 24/7 since 16 June, and that was me unplugging to rearrange some furniture. There are very occasional overnight breaks for maintenance as with any ISP, but these tend to be at silly hours when I'm sleeping.

The main drawback is the decline in customer service over the years. They used to answer the phone quickly and you'd generally get a person with a clue about technical matters, but now it's often standard "have you rebooted your router" stuff, which if I'm at the point of calling the ISP I've done. Unique to Zen is the way they seem to have difficulty communicating internally, so if you call with an issue and it can't be solved, and you call again, you get someone else who seems to have no record of your last call or your issue. Emails go into a black hole never to be seen again, forcing you to use the phone. They are also prone to the "I'll look into it and call you back" bull. Having had recent experience of EE for mobile, I'd put forward that I've had better and friendlier service on the phone from EE than Zen recently.

As for site blocking, they do fiddle around with the DNS to comply with legal orders - for instance, if you make a request to Zen's DNS for rt.com, it returns no results. A simple change of DNS to one of the major providers (8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 etc) makes such sites accessible, and DNS from these operators tends to be more solid than ISP DNS in any case.
 
@MissTuned
Thanks for your reply.

I am aware of Google's 8.8.8.8, but what/who is 1.1.1.1?


"I have Zen/CityFibre on the 300/300 package (which was actually provisioned at 300 down and 900 up, and has never been changed)."

Ye, this was mentioned previously in message #16. I asume that you are on CityFibre, or some other non-Openreach network?


"The main drawback is the decline in customer service over the years."

That is a point that a lot of replies have made here. I'm wondering though, if Zen's Customer Service used to be really good, but is now just no different to most other providers?

I have recently spoken to A&A about their VOIP service and found the level of technical support available to be excellent. Unfortunately, they don't offer the level of broadband package that I'm looking for, or at a price that I'm prepared to pay. Excellent customer service has to be paid for somehow!

"Having had recent experience of EE for mobile, I'd put forward that I've had better and friendlier service on the phone from EE than Zen recently."

EE are also my mobile supplier, and I agree that their customer service is very good.

.
 
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I was last with Zen in the mid 2010s and had a weird performance issue that didn't affect everyone, but did affect enough people to warrant a long running thread on the other major UK broadband forum.

Getting Zen to fix that was a major ordeal (even after going as far as to present graphs showing how performance plummeted like clockwork at specific times, clearly not a simple issue of network congestion). I was not impressed with the quality of their "technical" support. Even after it got escalated to a real network engineer they were incredibly cagey as to what it was or how it was fixed. This was on the BT Wholesale network.

That same line has now been on BT for going on 10 years and it has never seen this issue occur. Full speed all the time. Fully functional IPv6 too (it was a "trial" back when I was a customer, and they took me off it as part of the troubleshooting for the above issue)

As for government mandated site blocking - I think someone on here pointed out that certain "news" websites were not available following UK/EU sanctions, so it would appear that they are following the large ISPs in that regard
 
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