Zen Internet feedback please

bremen1874 · 24 Jul 2020 at 23:27

And I've never suffered from any network congestion (Plusnet at the moment).

I wouldn't recommend any ISP 100%. There's always a compromise somewhere, extra cost, waiting time to speak to support, difficultly using your own equipment, etc.

I know that in the three years or so I've now been with Plusnet all that being with Zen instead would have gotten me is a lighter wallet.

There are times where having more proactive ISP such as Zen can be worth it, but for most people, most of the time, probably not.

atomic7431 · 25 Jul 2020 at 09:52

They say you judge a company when you need its support, for me ive been with zen for 10 months and for the last 3 months ive needed an issue resolving and support has been nothing short of terrible.

They dont call you back when they say they will, ive been asked the questions again and again thats already been answered, then they stopped responding. I then put a resolver case in and they started responding again and gave me a solo high level support guy.
This guy i cant contact other than via email, and after 1 day he has also stopped responding until i put a full complaint in, then he sent this email -

Hello David,

Thank you for the update on this - will relay this information on to our fault management to see if there is absolutely nothing else that can be done and will of course keep our cancellations people informed. The reason I say it is worth discussing with our fault management is that we have had it in the past where a change of ONT has removed this issue you have had, even if an initial engineer did not make that change.

I am really sorry I haven't been able to keep you as updated as we would have liked, however have been helping with a large volume of inbound work and have not had any opportunity to look into specific cases with as much detail as I would have wanted

Regards,

Andrew

Technical Support Consultant

Now for me this email sums up their support in a nutshell, i appreciate they may be busy but to bring in personal info of his workload is not my issue and i expected better from them, im paying more than other companies and ive not gained anything except a headache.

I have ordered services elsewhere and told zen to politely keep their poor quality services.

jsbombjack · 25 Jul 2020 at 11:33

Which did you choose instead?

WJA96 · 25 Jul 2020 at 11:33

Other than Daisy, Zen would be my go-to ISP every time. You could argue that A&A are the very best, but they’re SO expensive they’d need to be.

WJA96 · 25 Jul 2020 at 11:39

atomic7431 said:
They say you judge a company when you need its support, for me ive been with zen for 10 months and for the last 3 months ive needed an issue resolving and support has been nothing short of terrible.

They dont call you back when they say they will, ive been asked the questions again and again thats already been answered, then they stopped responding. I then put a resolver case in and they started responding again and gave me a solo high level support guy.
This guy i cant contact other than via email, and after 1 day he has also stopped responding until i put a full complaint in, then he sent this email -

Now for me this email sums up their support in a nutshell, i appreciate they may be busy but to bring in personal info of his workload is not my issue and i expected better from them, im paying more than other companies and ive not gained anything except a headache.

I have ordered services elsewhere and told zen to politely keep their poor quality services.

Personal info? I don’t see anything in the response from Zen about that. Every call centre operator struggled during the pandemic because they simply couldn’t sit call-centre staff right next to each other and I believe Zen were affected the same and redistributed staff accordingly.

From the response it also seems like an open reach issue rather than Zen. Of course, Zen could have been more responsive but the most responsive 1st/2nd/3rd tier support staff can’t actually resolve an Openreach issue themselves.

Hopefully your new ISP will resolve your issues.

Deleted member 77746 · 25 Jul 2020 at 13:54

bremen1874 said:
And I've never suffered from any network congestion (Plusnet at the moment).

I wouldn't recommend any ISP 100%. There's always a compromise somewhere, extra cost, waiting time to speak to support, difficultly using your own equipment, etc.

I know that in the three years or so I've now been with Plusnet all that being with Zen instead would have gotten me is a lighter wallet.

There are times where having more proactive ISP such as Zen can be worth it, but for most people, most of the time, probably not.

k

on a good note anyone on a Fritz Box there is a new update come out.

FRITZ!OS: 07.20

jfp · 27 Jul 2020 at 09:41

I changed to zen from virgin media and would not go back. Zen have been brilliant, no issues with internet speed. I did have to ring them as I couldn't stick their router into modem mode, super knowledgable and helpful and sent me a different router that is already in modem mode.

I did need to ring them as couldnt get something sorted. They stayed on the phone for 1.5 hours helping me and when my phone dropped the call they rang me straight back. Got the issue sorted (was something stupid that I had done but cannot remember the specifics). Not needed to call them since.

I will never leave zen as I do not think I will get such a good service from anyone else. They constantly score top in the which broadband surveys.

jsbombjack · 8 Aug 2020 at 11:07

Well, so far so good.

Talked to Zen, they waived the setup fee as I don't need their modem/router. Good start. Then they managed to get everything sorted, give me a change over date and even senty username and password. All within an hour of talking to them.

Of course I appreciate this is the way things should work, but after dealing with Origin endlessly, actually good customer service from an ISP is something I am not used to yet.

Deleted member 77746 · 8 Aug 2020 at 11:13

A lot of you have to remember that behind every business support are humans not robots. Things will and do go wrong. It's how they fix it that matters. Not just from a technical point of view but from the start of wanting to become a customer right through to the contract ending.

When it comes to Internet connections I have witnessed time after time where people have complained that their broadband speeds are slow, blaming the ISP e.t.c only for me to realise it's their internal setup was mainly the cause of the said issues. A revamp of their internal networks and things are back to normal especially with WiFi connections.

jsbombjack · 8 Aug 2020 at 11:42

Which is why my important devices are wired. I've taken care to make sure things under my control are as good as they can be.

Thing is, you're right, but good customer service is a minimum requirement regardless. Hearing an Origin staff member tell me that they didn't care was a particular lowlight of their support (or lack thereof).

Fingers crossed Zen are better.

chapplejc · 12 Aug 2020 at 09:21

Zen have been superb for me the past three years. Faultless service.

digitalwolf · 13 Aug 2020 at 12:17

I'm gonna look at dumping EE for Zen at the end of my contract - simply because I don't want to sign another 2 year deal.

Pretty sure i'll be moved off BTw backhaul and onto Zen's own LLU network though. I'd rather stay on BTw if possible.

Eurofighter · 13 Aug 2020 at 23:54

digitalwolf said:
I'm gonna look at dumping EE for Zen at the end of my contract - simply because I don't want to sign another 2 year deal.

Pretty sure i'll be moved off BTw backhaul and onto Zen's own LLU network though. I'd rather stay on BTw if possible.

LLU is better

digitalwolf · 14 Aug 2020 at 12:28

Eurofighter said:
LLU is better

In what way?

BTw have multiple links going into exchanges - usually linked up to other exchanges in the area.

Some LLU providers rely on a single fibre connecting to the metro / POP. Break that, game over.

Eurofighter · 14 Aug 2020 at 16:37

I dont work there any more but which exchange are you on? I can find out how resilient it is but usually LLU is controlled by zen who are better than BTW.

Eurofighter · 14 Aug 2020 at 16:38

atomic7431 · 15 Aug 2020 at 10:00

OK, thought i would offer an update on this to show from my perspective just how poor Zen were in not listening to my complaint and never seemingly willing to fix my issues.

I ordered BT FTTP 900mb service on the 24th july, since then ive had numerous problems trying to get a live service. Initially BT openreach tried to take over port 2 on the 4 port ONT box i had. This seemingly would not work and i had to wait for Zen services to cease before Openreach could provision the port.
So the Zen service went on or around the 28th July and BT then tried to provision port 2 and couldn't, for some reason no matter what they did it just refused to give a solid pond on the ONT.

Thursday of this week BT made a dummy account and put an order through to provision port 1, this went live in 1 hour (very fast as been without service and BT wanted it sorted) the speed test results showed a mixed bag, but upstream would never raise above 9mb, the downstream was around 500mb.
BT booked an engineer who came today, he tried various tests and called their support team and eventually decided to change the ONT box, after doing this the speed instantly changed, 920mb down and 50mb up, also instead of the speed test slowly rising to its eventual max speed it was instant. I then used my own equipment an ASUS RT-X88U and tested again, the speed was 920mb down and 115mb up success.

So the long story is, if zen had listened to what i was saying all these months and sent out an engineer to fix the issue instead of never responding even when i had a dedicated support staff member, then the issue would have been fixed and Zen would still have a customer.

Im happy now its all fixed and im looking forward to using the connection again.

atomic7431 · 15 Aug 2020 at 10:00

double posted for some reason

VaderDSL · 15 Aug 2020 at 10:57

That sucks Atomic, did BT have to do anything with the fibre connector? Or was it simply, ONT all along? Did they use a new 4 port or are you on the single port now?

atomic7431 · 15 Aug 2020 at 18:11

VaderDSL said:
That sucks Atomic, did BT have to do anything with the fibre connector? Or was it simply, ONT all along? Did they use a new 4 port or are you on the single port now?

The only thing that was replaced was the ONT box, and i have the 1 port version which im told is what they use now.
Just pleased its finally running as expected, the engineer was very helpful and listened to what i had to say which was nice.