It's a cooling off period to decide if the contract you signed was right for you, it's not designed as a way to trial the service and then cancel it.

How can you make that decision without trying the service first, it still doesn't make any sense. The 14 day cooling off period is then basically useless at protecting the consumer.

Edited by Wizz_The_Great (Mon 05-Dec-22 10:44:05)

Pretty much and made even worse by the enforced delay on migrations.

Because that isn't what the cooling off period was ever intended for - it's not meant as a try-and-buy where the provider incurs £100+ of installation charges and then you cancel without penalty.

If the service isn't performing then consumer law that has existed for a long time outside of Ofcom's own regulations will protect you.

If you are using the same hardware and Ethernet cables then at least you have ruled this out and this would suggest the issue definitely is with Zen. Out of curiosity do you know if you are using Zen's own GEA network or on BT Wholesale or TalkTalk Business?

Most of the issues in the thread were for people using Zen's own GEA network, BT wholesale lines were not affected.

I am unsure, because it was a regrade from FTTC to FTTP the order area on the Zen portal doesn't state anything.

I asked the technical person from Zen on the phone and he didn't know but said "I think you are on BTW" but that doesn't mean anything if he didn't know for sure.

Either way they booked an engineer for Wednesday but I doubt the engineer will be able to fix it if its Zen's backend, they have sent me an email confirming I am not getting the minimum speed and if it can't be fixed in 30 days I can get out of the contract so that's something.

Can't recommend Zen anymore, speed is only getting worse as the days go on as well

In reply to a post by johnno101:

If you are using the same hardware and Ethernet cables then at least you have ruled this out and this would suggest the issue definitely is with Zen. Out of curiosity do you know if you are using Zen's own GEA network or on BT Wholesale or TalkTalk Business?

Most of the issues in the thread were for people using Zen's own GEA network, BT wholesale lines were not affected.

If the engineer gets there and finds no physical fault it may be worth asking him to phone Openreach DCoE and get them to check the build and perform a rebuild. Zen should have already told them to do this but this may help if the build isn't correct and get you on the right profile.

When did your friends connection go in? When did yours go live?

I'd be amazed if Zen were doing FTTP migrations onto the BT Wholesale platform simply because it's far more expensive than using their own network. They don't seem to care that their own network seems to be broken. Chances are if your friend has been a customer for longer than a year then they are on BT Wholesale.

Have you tried using your friends PPPoE details and they try using yours?

I have not tried my PPPoE details at my friends yet but he has only just had it installed a week ago and I have had mine over a year so this makes sense that I'm on BTW and he is on Zen's platform.

I will try to do this but my connection is always in use by someone in the house so its a bit difficult

In reply to a post by jpm:

When did your friends connection go in? When did yours go live?

I'd be amazed if Zen were doing FTTP migrations onto the BT Wholesale platform simply because it's far more expensive than using their own network. They don't seem to care that their own network seems to be broken. Chances are if your friend has been a customer for longer than a year then they are on BT Wholesale.

Have you tried using your friends PPPoE details and they try using yours?

In reply to a post by jpm:

When did your friends connection go in? When did yours go live?

I'd be amazed if Zen were doing FTTP migrations onto the BT Wholesale platform simply because it's far more expensive than using their own network. They don't seem to care that their own network seems to be broken. Chances are if your friend has been a customer for longer than a year then they are on BT Wholesale.

Have you tried using your friends PPPoE details and they try using yours?

There is some link between PPPoE details and whether you are on GEA or BTW - Zen have to make some server change when you move between them. I know this because twice I was migrated and the server change didn't happen, which left me without a working connection (as the authentication was set up on the other network still).

I'm not sure if that is the only thing tying the accounts to the service though, and whether it is possible to (if all other things are equal) move between services.

The OP could try to push Zen to sending one of the Samknows boxes to you to see how that behaves, I don't doubt it would also likely record poorer than expected performance. Mine was night and day when moving between Zen and BTW networks.

A symptom I noticed of the poor performance on the Zen GEA network was that most speedtest.net servers were poor, but there were a small number that were almost at line speed still. Swish fibre was one with OK performance, Voicehost (Norwich) was another, be interesting to know if any such difference is observed. Zen's own server was poor, as were most others. It's quite easy on the web interface or command line tool to specify particular servers.