I use Zen, saw your post so tried logging into my Customer Portal just to see. Straight in, no problems at all. Getting full speed I pay for all the time so perhaps not Zen per se?

When I ws with Zen I saw a few issues in relation to bandwidth and packet loss!

I was LLU though... During the day I would see congestion like issues... I always put this down to heavy usage by other businesses perhaps but then I started seeing issues with packet loss on my graphs and that it could be noticed at home also.

Zen where looking into it but nothing really came of it, one night it looked like Zen restarted a router or something somewhere and that cleared up the packet loss for a few days but then it returned,

I then lost interest due to moving home at which point me & Zen had a big falling out over outrageous moving costs.

The Zen site was down for a short time last night, first it showed the error in my ss, then a proper announcement about it being in accessible followed shortly afterwards by the site working again

The throughput issues i have seen so far since being with zen have been down to BTW and their poxy mismanaged back haul and SVLAN's or other parts of it's wbmc SHARED service

And twice Zen has sorted this with BT, problem is ,the same [censored] returns again and again, be it a few weeks later or a couple of months later

Edited by tommy45 (Wed 13-Jan-16 16:08:04)

In reply to a post by tommy45:

And twice Zen has sorted this with BT, problem is ,the same [censored] returns again and again, be it a few weeks later or a couple of months later

This doesnt bode well for areas with no alternatives. It does seem to be a bit of an ongoing saga to get a good service while many others glory on with no issues. Without the bigger picture of how BT / Openreach are managing network capacity it is frustrating. Its a shame they are not forced to publish that information.

There are alternatives as such both TT and Sky have their kit in my exchange, But it's when you want to maintain SMPF so only data is via their LLU kit, the choice becomes very limited thank's to the race to the bottom mass market isp's and their bundling bs

Pulse8 are happy to do SMPF - No contract tie-in and decent customer service.

Amazon have mentioned 14 companies who have gone all-in with AWS, abandoning their own data centres
http://static5.uk.businessinsider.com/image/5696bec2...

In reply to a post by professor973:

Pulse8 are happy to do SMPF - No contract tie-in and decent customer service.

Well before i migrated to Zen i enquired at pulse8 and they were adamant that it would be MPF As TT are in my exchange , However if this has changed which i doubt as line rental is only £6 when sold as a bundle i would possibly be interested , except for their fees even though it would be a migration of an active FTTC service that would not need any installation,

Edited by tommy45 (Wed 13-Jan-16 22:28:55)

Well assuming zen are using WBMC shared. Then you got 2 options.

1 - wait it out, plusnet are shifting their customers onto another WBMC product, since they are by far the biggest isp using WBMC shared, then this will free up capacity and I expect congestion issues will go away, obviously I got no idea of how long it will take plusnet to move all their customers, or at least enough to stop the congestion.
2 - Ditch BTw and use a isp with their own backhaul, which is either entanet, talktalk (talktalk resellers of ttb recommended) or sky.

I think all the issues that put you off pulse8 are trivial minor one's. I would go with one of these 3.

aaisp ttb resold
pulse8 ttb resold
sky

Also its good sense to use someone else's network for the website, as if zen's network ever goes down the first thing their customers may do is look for a status update on zen's website or contact details.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 14-Jan-16 05:37:48)