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.