Are zen still good for broadband?

I’m with Zen after a recommendation on here. They’ve been great so far. Reliable, consistent bandwidth, well priced and you actually get a decent router as opposed to some useless tat that most providers give you.

IME yep. Been with them for broadband and telephone for 10 yrs or so. Had a few moments of downtime, but can't recall anything that was their fault, ie it's been BT/Openreach instead. Had some persistent downtime a few weeks ago and they diagnosed it as a fault inside the house, so they assigned a BT engineer who came 2 days later and replaced our internal cabling and sockets for free.

The only difference I've noticed in terms of customer service is that they now take anything up to say 15 minutes to take a call, where until a year ago it was no more than 1 minute. Having said, they're all natives of this island and always willing to go the extra mile to test things and follow up.

Overall: spendy but worth it

Been excellent for me so far on fttp.

Zen are ok, they don't answer the phone at the weekend after 9pm. The one time I have needed to call (a network card their end had died and cut everyone off) the first words out of the chap's mouth was sorry.
Easy to use your own network kit too though unsupported by them.

Just chatting about them today oddly enough.
TEC support is spot on and the customers where positivity beaming.

I rate them! I worked there in the mid-2000's. Great company then, and am still a happy customer now.

Used to be with Plusnet, moved to zen. This is on FTTC using openreach lines.

Zen for whatever reason is much more stable than Plusnet. Think we've had two outages over 3 years. Each was about 10 minutes max.

Would highly recommend them.

Cost a bit more but IMO well worth it.

Also supplied router is usable and stable with a house or five including three teenagers, rather than some cheap mince which only handles about 5 concurrent connections.

OK thanks all.

They have already been so much better than plusnet. Might even be able to squeeze an installation visit in before xmas which is a bonus (although now sure how they can and plusnet can't as I assume it's openreach who do that stuff).

I am currently with IDNet which is alright apart from one incident where they said my FRITZ!Box was the problem.

I will be moving to No One when my contract is up for renewal as I fancy some full fibre. Good review and their full fibre is priced rather nicely.

We’ve been with them for years after some shocking service from PlusNet. There have been a few outages but not caused by Zen. Compensation was paid to us even though we didn’t know it was due, updated router provided too. Still on the same fixed price from probably over ten years ago. Rapid response from emails too.
Hope this helps.

Been with them 6 weeks after 18 months with Plusnet. Absolutely worth every penny to have wifi that never drops out.

Update: Got the installation date I thought I was getting with Plusnet so everything is going to plan. Was on hold for about a minute, and the hold music was this absolute banger:

(Any fans of the ReplyAll podacst will recognise immediately)

Been with Zen for more years than I can remember. No complaints although I think we’ve always used our own routers. Guess I should check to see if they supply one.

Folks have been with them for a year on FTTP. rock solid, very fast.

Honest question - I get there's differences in 'customer service', i.e. time to answer the phone, helpfulness if there's a problem, but in terms of 'internet service', so speed of line, outages etc, aren't they all the same, as it's really Openreach that actually get the internets to your house? All the ISP does is buy capacity from Openreach and give you a router.

@IHN See my post above. Don't know if it was the router but our speed and consistency increased when we moved from Plusnet to zen.

Been with Zen just over a year for FTTP broadband, £49 a month for 300 MBPS so, as had been said before, not cheap, but so far they have been rock solid reliable and with me now mainly working from home that's worth paying for.

They were also able to bring my new connection straight into the room in the house where my home office is allowing me to connect everything directly with hidden cables. The Fritz route is also mesh enabled and I also bought a Fritz mesh repeater downstairs which works well with minimal set up.

Having a 1 ms ping has proven pretty handy for playing Warzone as well, just sayin'.

Honest question – I get there’s differences in ‘customer service’, i.e. time to answer the phone, helpfulness if there’s a problem, but in terms of ‘internet service’, so speed of line, outages etc, aren’t they all the same, as it’s really Openreach that actually get the internets to your house? All the ISP does is buy capacity from Openreach and give you a router.

I think this is a myth really, there is a bit more to it than that. The local infrastructure is all openreach, but they do hand off to your provider eventually to make the final connection to the outside world. This is how they are able to offer parental controls etc. I had a terrible experience with plusnet where a comms session got ‘stuck’ the real pain was that non of their support people had a clue what they were talking about.

Sky used to be great but they have had a terrible run with reliability recently. I was on FTTP with them and had multiple, multi hour, outages. It was definitely Sky, not openreach. I think they force you to use their in house DNS server that kept failing.

Honest question – I get there’s differences in ‘customer service’, i.e. time to answer the phone, helpfulness if there’s a problem, but in terms of ‘internet service’, so speed of line, outages etc, aren’t they all the same, as it’s really Openreach that actually get the internets to your house? All the ISP does is buy capacity from Openreach and give you a router.

I worked at Zen when 'Local Loop Unbundling' was starting. It meant ISPs could put their own 'routers' in local exchanges, rather than relying on whatever BT had. This allowed them to offer faster/different services than the 2 or 3 BT ADSL products that were available at the time.

I don't know where it went after that - but there was definitely scope for ISPs to offer a better internet product than their competitors. I'd imagine that's still the case! Zen's business model was always that they could never hope to compete with the big companies on price, so went for a more expensive but better product.

At that time, the big rival was PlusNet. But they got bought out by BT and steadily went for a cheaper, more mass-market approach.

doris- Cheers for that, interesting

Yeah. Back in 'the day,' all DSL was exactly as you describe, it was BT Wholesale resold.

Ofcom leant on them to open up their network to other companies, which is the LLU that Doris was talking about. BT took to this like a duck to petrol but eventually other ISPs got to install their own kit at BT's exchanges. The upshot of which was that services freed from BT's monopoly were usually cheaper, faster or both.

For a good while the Established Wisdom answer to "what ISP?" was to jump onto an availability checker site like samknows.com and choose whichever local LLU provider took your fancy. If you have no other option than 'regular' DSL then this is still a valid recommendation.

Today though we have two cable providers (Virgin and, uh, someone else) and affordable Fibre to the Premises is gaining traction. They're almost certainly going to be a better option, IF they're available in your area.

Ah, that's interesting too Cougar, ta. So, according to samknows, the following is available at my exchange

BT Wholesale ADSL
BT Wholesale ADSL Max
BT Wholesale WBC (21CN)
BT FTTC
TalkTalk (CPW) LLU
Sky Broadband

So am I best looking at what TalkTalk or Sky can offer (currently with Shell)? There's no FTTP here, and we're miles from the cabinet. On a good day we'll get 11Mb.

My experience of Sky is that they were highly competitive if you also wanted TV services. I was with them for years, I only ditched them when I moved house and could get Virgin cable. Their tech support is (or was) diabolical though.

I have no direct experience with consumer-grade TalkTalk. We used to resell TalkTalk Business, maybe still do? They were... cheap, but I don't recall any large-scale showstopper problems. That said, what relationship TTB has with the artist formerly known as Carphone Whorehouse I do not know, they could be managed as two separate entities. TalkTalk is huge though so they're presumably doing something right.

Whether either will be better for you I don't know either. Can't hurt to ask I suppose. Shell is a little leftfield, did you get moved to them from the Post Office?

Shell is a little leftfield, did you get moved to them from the Post Office?

Nope, they were just the best deal on MSE at the time we moved in. Our email address (not that we use it, obvs) and account name is all '@firstutility' though.

A brief look online shows that TalkTalk want about what we're currently paying (£24) with a download guarantee of 10meg, Sky want £30 and think they can supply 8meg.

Zoomy.

Where do you live?

About a mile and a half out of Disley (home of your favourite escape room and bar 🙂 ) Up a country lane though, so about a mile from the nearest FTTC cabinet.

😁 And outside the catchment area of someone I thought might be able to help.

(I've never actually been in that bar. I should rectify that.)

I've been with Zen for several years now. Never had any issues with them, they've always been very helpful when I've contacted them and I don't mind paying slightly over the odds for an excellent package. Internet connectivity is not a luxury these days, it's an essential service and I need reliability and confidence. Zen give me that in spades.

Well, the guys from CityFibre just came, took about 90mins to set up and now my internet is so fast my face is melting. A couple of Mb/s faster than I've ordered, which is nice.

So far this process has been superb, and it's worked out about the same proce as plusnet anyway.

Hurrah.

So an old thread, my BT deal is up next week, are Zen still a go to ISP?

Been with then for years, zero issues.  Maybe a bit more than others but worth it IMHO. sent you a referral link if you wish to move to them

cheers

@bruneep, how long is a referral link valid for? I’ve got five months to go on my current (Sky) contract but will probably change once it’s up.

It may be worth seeing if there's anything else in your area other than 'traditional' broadband over a phone line.

FTTP fibre arrived here recently, I'm getting 500Mbps in both directions for about what phone line rental would have cost.  Magic.  Prior to that I had Virgin cable.

If I absolutely had to stick with DSL because there was nothing else then Zen would likely be my first port of call, I was with them for years and only left to jump to Sky because I wanted an Internet+TV deal.  ADSL's days are surely numbered, I can't imagine BT/Openreach being particularly enthusiastic about maintaining ancient copper after they've switched off the old phone system.

Not here in (very) rural Suffolk there isn’t Cougs unfortunately.

Or just a few miles out of 'silicon fen', my mother, who only just about understands what the internet is, has 5/6 times the download speed we max out at here!

Still use zen for now too.

Out of interest, and I understand traditional ‘landlines’ will shortly be a thing of the past, if I did switch to Zen would I have to use a separate company for VoIP?

I've been looking at VOIP, seems you have two types VOIP and Digital Voice.
Only the two old mums ever ring our number we never make outgoing calls and we are now on digital voice.
Zen do digital voice but it comes as a bundle with minutes, think its £5 a month which I don't want to pay really.

A&A do voip, put at cost to port your old number plus a small fee per month  https://www.aa.net.uk/

I did think of a cheap voip solution but couldn't work out a cheap easy way to do it. Would be great if I could just get our old number to a voip app on mobile or something.
If its going to cost I might just have to swallow the cost and get DV through Zen for the old girls if I can't get them to use our mobile numbers.

Don't tell them it's a mobile number?

If they can manage to dial 01... or 02... then they can dial 07... instead.

Agreed but my mum has a bit of dementia so its if I can get her to use the number and remember to use one of our mobiles.

@Watty are you on the radar for an exchange upgrade with Openreach? You can check here https://www.openreach.com/fibre-broadband/where-when-building-ultrafast-full-fibre-broadband

Scroll down and enter your post code

Thanks sandwich, but nope! ‘We don’t have any plans etc etc.’

edit. I’ve just had a look at the Zen ‘phone’ add-on, £6 which, as someone up there ^ just said, includes some calls, so Zen looks looks promising.