In reply to a post by pluralist:

As for Zen and IDNet, I think their high (if the still are) CS ratings could well be people just defaulting to five stars, having not used it for years. I even ended up dissatisfied with AAISP who just refused to accept the stats I gave them over a prolonged period when my line had been banded due to a faulty router which I replaced.

There is a large element of pot luck with any ISP. I had a similar experience with AAISP - uninterested in pushing Openreach to sort an FTTC line properly once a modest improvement had been made. Plusnet, on the other hand, pushed them far harder and got better results. They've even provided a /29 at no additional cost. Hard to beat for one of the cheaper suppliers.

Mine went down for a few minutes at the same time... caused me a lot of aggro, but not for the usual reasons.

I was investigating a wierdie on my system at the time, and trying to make sense of what was going on when I thought I only had one problem but a second one was also sticking its oar in made my brain hurt

I wasn't until I saw this thread a bit later and realised that there'd been a brief outage in the middle of things that all became much clearer

In reply to a post by E300:

Indeed, they aren't getting my custom for another year, I'm shortly leaving IDNet as contract is almost up. Don't think I've gone more than 30 days before IDNet/Zen have needed to drop PPP and throw me on a more congested around the UK route.

So much for Zen's wonderful redundancy having all these different routes, it didn't help anyone today!

Who are you considering moving to E300?

Think once my term is up with TTB (admittedly not for a while) I’ll shift the FTTP to either Aquiss or back to Cerberus. We parted on good terms thankfully. 😀

Is there a problem with TTB?

Not with the service itself Bob. That’s been pretty solid.

Saying that there were a few more ppp resets in the first few months, than for the previous 12 months. but they were all post midnight / early morning hours and lasting no longer than 5 to 10 minutes.

Had some repeated billing related stuff took a few tries before they fully sorted it. A few more attempts than what I thought was necessary. I think it’s all ok though now. Perhaps symptomatic of dealing with a new larger ISP than a small one.

The true test will be when we have a serious fail / outage and how they deal with that.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Who are you considering moving to E300?

Think once my term is up with TTB (admittedly not for a while) I’ll shift the FTTP to either Aquiss or back to Cerberus. We parted on good terms thankfully. 😀

Thinking about moving back to Cerberus. I think Aquiss are a BT Wholesale reseller so don't have their own network or peering arrangements as that is all done by BT, not necessarily a bad thing but I prefer when paying a bit more the ISP has their own network and their own technicians should you get some odd issue, and you aren't lumped up with millions of other customers quite so much!

I'm not sure of how IDNet use Zen for us FTTP customers, I presume they use Zens layer 2 interconnect service to get us to IDNets own gateways, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were using Zen's managed wholesale product for some customers, so basically it might just be Zen all the way, and this would explain why there is no method, like they once offered, to move backhaul supplier if a customer was unhappy.

I'm happy to pay more for better connectivity, but not happy to pay more for something I could buy direct for less money and cut out the middle man at the same time.

Am I right in thinking Cerberus use BT Wholesale backhaul?

To the best of my knowledge, yes they use BT Wholesale backhaul.

They most certainly did when I was with them. I've heard nothing subsequently to suggest they have moved supplier.

Thanks for your thoughts E300. Might be worth having a chat with Martin Pitt from Aquiss to clarify their network and support arrangements. He's always struck me as a pretty fair and open chap.

I'm glad Cerberus finally pulled their regular FTTP pricing back into the real world a few months ago, but it was too late for me. So will see how things pan out.

Good luck.