Cerberus 900/110 -> Zen Business, Talk Talk, Cerberus again?

Have been with Cerberus now for coming up 2 years after initially ordering FTTPoD with them back in mid 2018. So a full year under FoD then another year as native FTTP regraded to 900/110 (Ultra 2 package).

Contract is coming up for anniversary in early June, so looking at the possible contenders for a 'business lite' service with static IP. Thus far contenders are:

Zen Business, Full Fibre 900 (900/100): £85 ex VAT for 24 months or £90 ex VAT for 12 months. Standard service is 24-hour response. Critical Care reduces the response SLA to 12 hours, for £20 on top.

Talk Talk Business, 950/115: £59.95 ex VAT for 24 months or £69.95 ex VAT for 12 months. TTB have also put in writing their minimum and maximum range of bandwidths and a minimum guaranteed floor that is 50% of the DL speed, and are (verbally) claiming a max. 65% utilisation on their 10G Cablelinks.

Cerberus have been excellent overall as far as faults are concerned and I know they don't oversubscribe their backhaul but on a value for money basis as it stands, on the current best tariff for that bandwidth they are £25 ex VAT adrift of Zen and £50 ex VAT adrift of TTB. My understanding however is that Cerberus will be announcing revised package prices in the next fortnight, still be in time to make a final decision. However the question is how much will they drop tariffs realistically? Guess will need to wait and see.

I will be running another (path independent) service as failover / backup, so the fault response time is becoming less of a priority but the other facets of a business grade connection are still quite important.

Really it boils down to is the premium for Cerberus that worthwhile and conversely is the 'discounted' price of the TTB offering that risky?

Any other thoughts, experiences or suggestions of FTTP business CPs that I should be considering?

TIA

Colours nailed to mast. Gone with TTB for 24 month deal on the back of their recently announced “back to business” deal with 3 months free offer.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Colours nailed to mast. Gone with TTB for 24 month deal on the back of their recently announced “back to business” deal with 3 months free offer.

We used to use TTB and i can't fault them, we only moved because they didn't support what we wanted in terms of a leased line.

Make sure you've got their web portal saved in your iPhone etc, so that if anything does go wrong you can get them to run a test very quickly.

Thank you. That’s good feedback.

I have gotten used to getting great service from a couple of smaller providers for FTTP (and leased line at another location), so going back to a larger mainstream provider brings some mixed thoughts about what service will be like.

I have nothing bad to say about Cerberus, they helped us to get FTTP in the first place, but I feel their standard pricing has been pitched a bit high for too long now.

New service - TalkTalk Business 900:



Previous service - Cerberus FTTP Ultra2 (900 down, 110 up):



No down time migrating from Cerberus to TTB, I think there was a one minute drop in service at ten past midnight yesterday, as service ceased and migrated. The existing PPPoE credentials 'just worked' with new service from TTB without change, so the router just auto re-initiated and brought up the 'new' connection without any interaction! Can see some additional minimum/baseline latency on the TTB connection, maybe an extra 1 or 2ms compared to Cerberus, but not enough to be concerned about.

Some closing invoice niggles to be worked out with Cerberus, otherwise so far all OK pretty much.

Nice one! Does the BQM remain the same? Lucky on you FTTP

So far, yes. Pretty uneventful, which is good.