Zen or Yayzi

I am switching providers from VM sometime in the next few months or weeks as they are asking stupid money and makes no sense to me.

New customer can have M500 for £36. I am with O2 so I get a free boost to 1Gig. I currently pay £48 for that same package. With renewal they want me to pay £52. No thanks. Since I can get 1gig up and down for less.

But I can't decide who to go with.

The 2Gig package from Yazi is of interest to me as I run my own web and game server at home and having the extra speed and upload would be advantageous.

Zen are rumored to be adding a 2Gig package later in the year as well.

To start with I will be switching to just a 900mb package to start with since I am off sick from work for another 2/3 weeks and only getting SSP+UC.

Once I am back to getting a full pay cheque I will upgrade to the faster package.

I know Zen, I was with them back in 2007-10 for ADSL service and they were great back then. If I called and asked for my SNR target to be changed to 3dB they knew what I wanted and got it sorted for me.

Are Yayzi the same? Are Zen still good in that regard? I do not have the patience to deal with support that don't know anything, Like VM for example or TalkTalk.

The one thing that puts me off Yayzi at the moment is it looks like the website has not been kept uptodate in some areas

I am in Peterborough, Covered by City Fibre GPON network. I believe it's being upgraded to XGS-PON.

Reliability and support are important to me though more than the speed is. The speed is a nice to have vs a need.

Cheers

I can understand your concerns over customer service. I too when I was with ADSL regardless of ISP I needed to have my SNR capped in my case I needed to have it capped to 9dB manually to have a stable and reliable internet connection. That was due to my old EO Line being terribly unreliable. And it didn't matter what ISP I was on, the service was always dropping out. I could get 15-16Mbps but it would drop out every few hours. Calling ISP and capping to 9dB resolved drop out issues at the expense of reduced speeds at 11-12Mbps. But like you I also cared more about having a stable and reliable internet connection as opposed to having a few megs more in connection speed. For me 11Mbps but stable for days onwards was always going to be better than having 16Mbps but drop out every few hours.

In the case of FTTP now that you have it, you don't have to worry about SNR! As FTTP doesn't have noise margin related issues that's typical of copper. The copper used for ADSL is certainly more notorious for line stability.

When I finally got upgraded to FTTC in October 2019 and switched to TalkTalk FTTC at that time my connection issues were instantly resolved! It was the most reliable connection I ever had despite never previously using TalkTalk under ADSL.

I'm 100% certain that any FTTC or even FTTP connection that will be used even with TalkTalk that has a worse customer service will offer better reliability than even ZEN on my old ADSL line.

I am expecting that the reliability will naturally be very strong that you won't have to worry about contacting customer service. I mean, that's the whole point about having the whole country upgraded to FTTP in the first place so that the ISPs and the wholesale network providers don't have to employ call centers to resolve technical issues that copper is far more prone to suffer from.

In your case since Yayzi and Zen are both using the CityFibre network any service outage you may get would be affected on both of them and all ISPs that use the same CityFibre network provider. You will certainly not have to deal with anything SNR related.

The only problem I heard with Zen and Yayzi is that they have CGNAT that may be a problem for you if you need to port forward. However, Yayzi can get it removed for £2 more a month.

No CGNAT on Zen.

I honestly dont know what to suggest but will offer my thoughts.

I believe a lot of the new providers that have appeared out of nowhere have been setup in a manner to do the minimal investment required to get the business going, and its likely planned for them to get gobbled up in an acquisition. So their only interest is acquiring customers and network setup minimal as possible, hence CGNAT, no IPv6, having to rebuild networks even whilst in infancy, consolidations etc. I have tried to stay away from these networks.

Yayzi stands out as they clearly doing more than the minimal, they have now retired CGNAT, enabled IPv6, proactively deploying 2.5g ONT's even for 1g customers, I suspect you may have noticed this yourself hence narrowed it down to them and Zen.

However They are still a new player and have visible growing pains, not much is known about their peering/transit arrangements, some of these new isp's have extremely basic transit connectivity and as such odd routing happens like going through Spain for UK to UK traffic (hey broadband).

If you are wanting something thats more likely to "just work", I would go with Zen. But if you want to save a bit of money, have the thrill of trying someone who seems to be willing to push the boundaries in the market try Yayzi. They do have active support on reddit it seems if you ever have support problems. Also it can be considered low risk as currently they offering 18 month contract prices on a rolling contract for reddit users.

In reply to a post by wiggsc00:

No CGNAT on Zen.

Ok, it may not have CGNAT. But here's what I found out from the price comparisons for CityFibre network.

Zen Internet
Full Fibre 900
Most Popular
900 Mbps
Average Download
£40.00 per month free set-up
900 Mbps
Average Upload
450 Mbps
Min. Guaranteed Download

Yayzi
Cheapest Package​​
900 Plus
£35
per month
18 month contract ⓘ
FREE Installation

Zen being £5 more expensive means that the CGNAT removal is included in the price. While Yayzi may cost £35 but add £2 more to have CGNAT removed will still be £3 cheaper than Zen.

Vodafone and Toob are also cheaper. For example Toob is £25 but even after paying £8 to have CGNAT removed it still ends up cheaper.

Now the rest is about customer service and ISP performance. I cannot say what ISP is best. Because ADSL, FTTC, FTTP will vary from performance on all ISPs. Even Openreach vs CityFibre will have differences like for example symmetrical upload and download for CityFibre that Openreach currently does not have.

Next comparison is the router. Zen https://en.avm.de/products/fritzbox/fritzbox-7530-ax...
Yayzi https://www.tp-link.com/uk/home-networking/wifi-rout...

Both seem very similar in performance. Router comparisons are just as important when you compare different ISPs. You want to know, which router is the better quality as that can make a difference in reliability, speed, latency and ease of port forwarding (if you need it).

Well... I went with Yayzi and so far so good.

Ping is much more stable and lower than VM

My Broadband Ping

And as for speed..
https://www.speedtest.net/result/16368057626.png

I hope Yayzi does well. And I hope my connection does well also.