Zen Internet - Good - Bad - or Ugly?

I was with Zen for years and couldn't fault them, but that was a good long time ago now.

Third party public DNS servers are available. See https://www.quad9.net/ and others.

Do you still actually use your "house phone"?

Is FTTP available in your area?

Just had to manually change the DNS connections per device because plusnet messed up again. I dont understand why they prevent you having a real backup DNS in their router settings - most other ISPs I have been with allow you to change this.

@allfankledup - if you have some basic IT knowledge you can access the TCIp/IP settings in control panel and add a DNS server there (assuming windows). This obviously only works for the device you change obviously.

ust had to manually change the DNS connections per device because plusnet messed up again. I dont understand why they prevent you having a real backup DNS in their router settings – most other ISPs I have been with allow you to change this

I just popped the google dns into my router settings

Reconfigured the DNS to get back online - Cloudflare this time. We've had a couple of outages with them over the last 18months and eventually it's time to have a look about. Lack of a service status page is a big miss just now.

FTTP is available - the kids will appreciate it 😉

House phone - yeah occasionally - will probably ditch it when the previous generation are no longer with us tbh

I just popped the google dns into my router settings

sadly mine is locked down - plusnet hub one

Been with Zen for probably 15 years.... Only ever had one issue that was sorted quickly and wasn't even their fault.

(And I usually always use Google's DNS servers)

We were with zen, found them a little expensive so changed. We good when we had issues though.

House phone – yeah occasionally – will probably ditch it when the previous generation are no longer with us tbh

For them to ring you? A number is a number these days.

You're paying ~£25/month line rental on top of everything else for an ADSL bearer you no longer need with FTTP, and for a landline that's of little practical use unless you have terrible mobile reception and can't get Wi-Fi Calling on your mobile provider. Get it sacked off.

(And I usually always use Google’s DNS servers)

Is there any reason for me to switch back to the plusnet ones now that they're working again?

House phone – yeah occasionally – will probably ditch it when the previous generation are no longer with us tbh

For them to ring you? A number is a number these days.

You’re paying ~£25/month line rental on top of everything else for an ADSL bearer you no longer need with FTTP, and for a landline that’s of little practical use unless you have terrible mobile reception and can’t get Wi-Fi Calling on your mobile provider. Get it sacked off.

going to port the number and set up a SIP type thing - Zen are £6 or so - that'll work for me

@Simondbarnes - a number of their failures appear to be DNS related - I'd stick with cloudflare/google.

We switched to them past few months for full Fibre and porting telno. Have a sea4ch will find my own post on this forum and my and others views. Only had to use their tech support once as had an issue trying to setup a mesh extender. Couldn’t fault their help a long phone call as they talked me through each setup step and stayed on call with me until it was sorted. Actual Fibre been fine and a fairly consistent 500mbps as promised and no failures. 

Been with Zen since a recommend on here. No issues at all. Some good features on the routers too , eg managed to share the whole of Last of Us for my son to download off a USB stick. Pretty cool. Not like the pathetic Sky route router I put up with for a few years!
Zen may not be the fastest on the mbps checking software online, but I have no complaints about speed and reliability is the best I've had.

Is there any reason for me to switch back to the plusnet ones now that they’re working again?

No.

going to port the number and set up a SIP type thing – Zen are £6 or so – that’ll work for me

Realistically, who actually rings it? Set up your SIP/VoIP, but then when anyone calls go "hey, here's our new number, call us back."

Had FTTP from Zen for two years now. Has been rock solid, no issues until the week before Xmas when the Zen router died at 4:30pm. Phoned their support up, got straight through to a knowledgeable human, problem logged and a new router was in my hands by lunchtime the next day couriered by DPD. Excellent service. If I had still been with Virgin I would have still been in the customer service queue by lunchtime the next day!

We're on Zen.  Not cheap but do seem clued-up.

Course, the big test would come if/when a problem arises and I haven't seen that

We were in the same situation as the OP. Moved from Plusnet to Zen about 4 years ago. Zen do cost more but the support is good, you get a fixed IP and the router is excellent.

Speed was in theory the same as Plusnet (FTTC) and it used the same cabling but it oddly seemed quicker and more responsive.

Had to stop using them when we moved house as they weren't available at our new address. That being said were using the Zen (Fritz box) router at the new place as it's better than the one that our new ISP provided.

If you want the mesh system don't buy it from Zen as you can get an additional Fritz router from eBay for about £30 - £40 to act as a mesh node.

Zen are a fantastic company, great values and ethics.

A mate works for them and loves it, thye look after their staff.

They are a certified B Corp.

Worthy of your money.

https://www.zen.co.uk/our-story/planet/b-corporation/

When we moved here a year ago plusnet made a total balls up of setting up our account so after asking on here I went for Zen. Only a few quid a month more expensive but exemplary customer service and a way better router.

Was with them for a few years - had had enough of being mucked around by BT and just wanted someone reliable. Zero problems with their service, good customer service too.

Was with Zen for a few years in the last house with FTTP and they were spot on no problems that I can remember everything just worked.

We use Zen at home and office. No complaints.

I have dabbled with cheaper alternatives a couple of times and quickly decided it’s just not worth the hassle to save a couple of quid a month. Zen are as close to zero hassle a supplier as we have.

We had Zen with the old copper wire connection. They had the same technical problems with Openreach as every other provider, but they answered the phone quicker when you wanted to complain about it

I've been with Zen for donkeys years (and Demon or whoever they were before that) with no plans to change - that said I wouldn't typically recommend to friends & family unless they've had issues with other ISPs. These days Internet service is much more reliable in general, I've only had to call Zen support a couple of times in 10 years (and both turned out to be issues outside of their control). Obviously when you do need to call it's great to deal with an ISP that doesn't spend more effort trying to pass the buck somewhere else rather than investigate the issue but given you should need to call them so rarely it's hard to justify the increased cost.

I moved my employers at the time over to Zen. It was a few years ago but I remember them as *the* best ISP I had ever worked with. As others have said they weren't the cheapest but when has cheap been a guarantee of good service? Domestically. don't know.

Went to visit their facility at Rochdale a few times. Very impressive setup and the staff I interacted with seemed to be very happy working there.

As broadband providers they've been good and statically priced for the last 3 years or so since I moved to them.

I decided to stick with their Fritzbox stuff for mesh and didn't want to pay for it monthly, getting it in the UK was pricey and a bit annoying. I seem to recall doing it as they have something locked down on the router? But life is too short to spend working on networking stuff I just don't care about.

@toby1 Nothing locked down as own router use is easy with Zen, we didn't use their router as all I did with my kit is enter the new login details, restart and off we went.

As above very good experience with support the only time I needed them (dead card in the kit installed oop north somewhere took the internet out). First words out of the support workers mouth were "I'm sorry. . .". Would have stayed with them but they are tied to BT for full fibre here and that wasn't available when I signed with iDnet.

A mate works for them and loves it, thye look after their staff.

I worked for them - a long time ago now! - and yeah, it was a great place to work. Richard the CEO was a really good bloke.  I have been a customer ever since 🙂

Nothing locked down

Thanks, I really didn't look into it an any detail. The Fritzbox stuff seems to work well for all my streaming devices anyway. I just wish I lived in an area with better broadband, but that's an openreach thing, not Zen.

I've been with Zen on and off for 20 years (mostly on, but sometimes off after a house move). I've always ended up going back to them because they deal with problems better than anyone else - they're just really good to have on side when Openreach have broken something.

Edit: sometimes with my own modem/router/AP, sometimes with their Fritzbox kit, depending on what I need.

Obviously when you do need to call it’s great to deal with an ISP that doesn’t spend more effort trying to pass the buck somewhere else rather than investigate the issue but given you should need to call them so rarely it’s hard to justify the increased cost.

Ah, the IT Manager's Paradox.

Everything is shit, the boss wonders what they're paying you for. Everything works perfectly, the boss wonders what they're paying you for.

Zen customer here for 10 yrs or so. Yes, they're pricier but as I've been saying year after year, if you have an issue then they'll do everything to sort it, even doing checks and talking you through stuff beyond their remit. The only difference as of 2-3 years ago is that they often take 1-2 mins to pick up the phone as opposed to seconds prior.

Definitely Good. Another happy Zen customer here. Working from home I can't afford to have an unreliable ISP, and now we have FTTP the speed is off the charts compared to what I need. The limiting factor now tends to be the devices connected to the internet. I've dealt with their customer service for a few issues and they've been brilliant - the last one was OpenReach making a balls-up of the connection at the exchange, but Zen were very understanding and went out of their way to help resolve the issue. You get what you pay for in life, in general.

Another long term customer.  Brilliant service, great company.  Only downside is I'm stuck on FTTC because I got a "price for life" guarantee, so if I move to FTTP, the contract re-starts and I only get a "price for the contract" guarantee instead.  Me just being tight though!

+1 FTTP Zen customer here, there are cheaper options but I WFH so reliability is paramount, only had to call them once and they were very easy to deal with.   

No complaints but yeah, there will always be cheaper options.

Switched to Zen from Plusnet a few years back when the old house was upgraded to FTTP, they were excellent to deal with on a new line that didn't exist in any database yet.  After about a year of invisible service we had a line outage, I spent about an hour on the phone to Zen support while they did line checks and had me check some things (the chap was unphased that I was running my own router and that I had already done fairly extensive troubleshooting, he simply skipped over a bunch of standard checks and asked me for specific information from the router rather than talking me through what to read off of the screens of their own routers, very impressed), after which he declared it a hardware fault at the FTTP node and had a BT engineer on site to fix it within a further 24 hours.

Moved into a new house last year and similarly had a couple of issues with the new line getting activated. Once again the support tech was superb, got BT to sort the issue quickly (on a Saturday no less!!) and we were back online, has been 100% solid ever since.  Oh and moving to the new house meant a new contract which meant my 1Gbps service cost dropped by almost £15 a month from the previous contract.. !!  Win, win, win..  

Unless things change dramatically or their reliance on the BT infrastructure means they fall significantly behind in speed provision in the future then as far as I am concerned they have a customer for life.

The only difference as of 2-3 years ago is that they often take 1-2 mins to pick up the phone as opposed to seconds prior.

TBF when I worked there, the Customer Service desk was 6 people. It only took one person to be on holiday, and another to get stuck on a particularly thorny issue, for queue times to start creeping up. I haven't had to call them in the last couple of years though!

Everything is shit, the boss wonders what they’re paying you for. Everything works perfectly, the boss wonders what they’re paying you for.

🤣

sadly mine is locked down – plusnet hub one

Could you hastle them to send you a new router and send the old one back?

I changed my DNS at the router from plusnet to Quad9 primary, and google, secondary... Might be emporers new clothes but I'm sure websites are a bit more zippy to load/refresh*

*unless the website is slow anyway (cough, mentioning no names, cough!).

Another happy Zen customer here (FTTC). Pretty much +1 on all the above - they're great and very helpful on the odd occasions that I've needed to ring them.

However given 90% of DSL issues come down to Openreach to fix, there are limits to what they can do / when they can get things done. They did ring me up to get my side of a story once when Openreach tried to charge them for an engineers' visit. After a brief conversation his response was along the lines of "Well I'm sending that straight back to them then, sorry to disturb you." I suspect some suppliers would just have sent the bill on to me.

They wouldn't/couldn't, however, supply me with a new master socket front when the ADSL filter built into mine packed up. Again I suspect this is Openreach not trusting me to plug it in (despite trusting me to unplug it as a fist diagnostic step!)

Excuse the thread resurrection. I'm going with Zen as soon as I decide FTTP or FTTC. It seems they do a mutually beneficial refer-a-friend; anyone want to volunteer?

I’m going with Zen as soon as I decide FTTP or FTTC

Why on earth would you go FTTC?

Certainly, thanks very much!

https://zen.mention-me.com/m/ol/au1kh-03409e6853

@jamesmio thanks, will do when the time comes.

Why on earth would you go FTTC?

Sage question, it's a bit of an odd one. I attempted FTTP with my current ISP 2 years ago and was met with a £1800 quote to dig the 5m garden & 5m driveway from pavement fibre box to my front door. I didn't get much of an explanation and figured either there were no subsidies still floating around some 7-8 years after fibre arrived in my street, or that my ISP was too small to absorb the cost into their business model.

Fast forward to now, copper is a dirty word and my exchange (like all now I gather) is in a state of WLR withdrawal - so I wonder if now, and with a bigger ISP I might have the option of FTTP for a reasonable installation cost. If so, do I really want my driveway dug up considering the brilliant</s> job utilities seem to make when they dig up the highway. I'm still on ADSL so even 10/40 FTTC will be a massive upgrade.

Been with them on copper for years, got full fibre (500 service) being installed on Thursday.

@borosilicate Maybe find out who is good on thrust boring locally and ask if they can fit you a duct to the highway.

My FTTP has just dropped from a consistent 170-180 to a feeble 80-90.

Time to test the Zen CS.