Each ISP has their pro's and con's, I have recently switched to Plusnet and am more than happy with the broadband and the customer service. Each time I have spoken to customer service they have been very helpful although I haven't had an outage to see how they respond to that, appreciate people here may have different views of them. Zen wasn't on my consideration list when switching due to them using their own backhaul which doesn't have a good track record. Some of the smaller ISPs are more expensive and if paying more is OK for you then they should be a consideration as their customer service is likely to be very good but virtually all of them are resellers so are limited on what they can do when the backhaul owner says no.

In reply to a post by PCJM40:

Each ISP has their pro's and con's, I have recently switched to Plusnet and am more than happy with the broadband and the customer service. Each time I have spoken to customer service they have been very helpful although I haven't had an outage to see how they respond to that, appreciate people here may have different views of them. Zen wasn't on my consideration list when switching due to them using their own backhaul which doesn't have a good track record. Some of the smaller ISPs are more expensive and if paying more is OK for you then they should be a consideration as their customer service is likely to be very good but virtually all of them are resellers so are limited on what they can do when the backhaul owner says no.

You seem to be majoring on backhaul -- why? There's more to an ISP than just the backhaul between the telephone exchange and the core network.

In my mind not being a backhaul owner is generally an advantage. You say you're with Plusnet -- they'll exclusively use BT Wholesale for backhaul as they're part of BT Group. If BT's backhaul is congested then you'll be waiting for them to resolve that. Other ISPs use a variety of backhaul providers (e.g. I know A&A uses BT Wholesale and TalkTalk Business, pretty sure IDNet use BT Wholesale and Zen) -- this means that the provider might be able to move your line to an alternative backhaul if there's congestion.

Being part of BT Group, Plusnet are keen to "double dip" and charge content providers for sending content to their customers (see BT Group's submission to Ofcom for more details). This may or may not be something that concerns you -- but the result is likely to be a more limited form of internet -- e.g. see Twitch pulling out of South Korea.

Each to their own, personally unlike yourself I am not interested in those edge cases including if Twitch are pulling out of South Korea. If and when I see a limited form of internet over my home broadband connection I will react accordingly but until then I will enjoy my extremely cheap and cheerful connection

In reply to a post by behuk:

You seem to be majoring on backhaul -- why?

A number of Zen users on this forum have reported degradation of service when they were moved from BT backhaul to Zen backhaul. You'd think that if they'd found the underlying problem they would have told people, so best guess is that the problem still exists.

(To be fair, with a few users they tried *very* hard to find the problem, including shipping out custom routers. But in the end the only solution they had was to move them back to BT backhaul, and most customers don't get this choice)

I've been with Zen (on CityFibre) for nearly two years and have had no issues with them. On the two occasions that I've had to call tech support the call handlers have been interested in their work and helpful. They understand tech-speak.
Previously I was with PlusNet for quite a long time, probably more than 20 years, and never had any problems with them. I only moved to Zen because they could give me FTTP and PlusNet couldn't.

Always been spot on for me. I left them briefly to save a couple of quid but went back to them in the end.

I was on Plusnet for a long time, and they were also good both from network reliability and for fault handling, especially for the price.

I moved away when I got FTTPoD, and I haven't moved back because they still don't do IPv6 - although apparently they've started to trial it (again).

I was with Zen until September. Had been with them for years. Service had been decent until upload speed just went [censored] a lot. They wouldn't or couldn't fix it so I left. Tech support didn't answer the phone within a reasonable time and they wouldn't offer support via email either.

I switched to Andrews and Arnold. The broadband side has been pretty good but the VOIP has had a few hiccups that I could do without.

Most ISPS are mixed bags.

In reply to a post by behuk:

You seem to be majoring on backhaul -- why? There's more to an ISP than just the backhaul between the telephone exchange and the core network.

In my mind not being a backhaul owner is generally an advantage. You say you're with Plusnet -- they'll exclusively use BT Wholesale for backhaul as they're part of BT Group. If BT's backhaul is congested then you'll be waiting for them to resolve that.

I've not seen a BT Wholesale complaint about congestion for quite a few years now.

The issue is Zen ARE a backhaul owner and they are growing and expanding their own backhaul.
They are migrating current customers off of BT and Talktalk backhaul on to the Zen backhaul.

The Zen backhaul is absolutely s*** particularly for anything 500Mb+
There's constant complains here and elsewhere over many months (maybe even a year now) from Zen users who have been moved from a perfectly functioning, full speed 24/7 backhaul on to the Zen backhaul.

Zens backhaul doesn't even seem to be congested. It's a configuration issue somewhere. Most of the complaints are of low throughput immediately upon the change of backhaul and it's all day everyday.
Zen seemed to make genuine attempts to fix this, even sending technical guys from their team to some customers homes.
That attempt to fix things has failed and the issue still exists to this day, with zero communication from Zen on it.
Their fix? Move customers back to BT Wholesale or let them leave. A few months later they migrate them back to Zen backhaul and the cycle starts again.

It might be area specific or a hardware specific issue that only affects a sub set of customers, so others might have a perfectly good connection over Zen backhaul. I don't know because Zen either hasn't gotten to the bottom of it or hasn't communicated it with customers. The only comment I ever seen (on here from Zen staff) was they thought it was an Openreach issue.

I wouldn't take my broadband for free from Zen now. I closed the last account I maintain with Zen around 2 years ago when 3 emails over 6 days went unanswered.

IMO Zen are a shadow of the company they used to be. I highly recommended them for many years but now warn against using them.

I've been with ZeN since December 2002 after they were proactive in the local campaigns to upgrade to ADSL (anyone remember them!). I did move to another ISP for a period (BeThere) on the promise of slightly faster speeds, they went bust, I came back to ZeN and have been more than happy since.

I'm now on FTTP having been on ADSL, FTTC also with ZeN.

Think this is my first post on these boards in quite a long time - hi!