Are Zen expensive?

Influenced by the FUD I looked at Zen options for gigabit FTTP via Openreach. Zen are £55, fixed price, fixed IPv4 and (dispite the FUD) have a good reputation.
The gold standard around here appear to be AAISP. But for that piece of mind you pay £75 (plus £100 setup!). Aquiss get good press and are also £55, no increase and a fixed IP.
The best price I could come up with was IDNet. They seemed respectable until I noticed their 'home' price - £48 - was plus VAT. So £55 too. The actual best price I've found so far is TalkTalk Business at £44.34 inc VAT. But I'm unsure about costs foir a fixed IP from them.

Sure there's Sky at £44 but 'price may change' and will after contract to £63.

So given a fixed IPv4 is required, Zen aren't expensive, are they?

A tenner a month is a decent saving, are TalkTalk Business worth looking at?

Are folk still having trouble with Zen's backhaul?

In reply to a post by Woolwich:

The actual best price I've found so far is TalkTalk Business at £44.34 inc VAT. But I'm unsure about costs foir a fixed IP from them.

Websites says "Free Static IP, available on request"
Price appears to be a winter sale saving £120 over 24 months so is the full price ~£50 inc vat?
Also appears to have a CPI % annual increase and a £30 setup fee.

It's a very subjective question, and I don't think there are two ISPs offering the same service where you're doing a like-for-like price comparison - they all have a different combination of features and support. Even comparing the more budget providers like TalkTalk and Vodafone there will be differences in the supplied hardware, whether IPv6 is an option or not (it's deploying on Vodafone and nowhere to be found on TalkTalk).

TalkTalk's 500Mbps service is the equivalent of £39/month, £45 for Zen with static IPv4 and IPv6 doesn't look like an extravagance.

Aquiss is also half-price for first 6 months, with no setup fee, which makes it very good value for the first year - effectively 12 months for the price of 9.

After that you're paying the full price, but that price is fair (IMO), doesn't have baked-in rises, and after 12 months you're free to leave.

I think this model gives a very good incentive for them to provide good service to keep you as a customer, rather than locking you into a new long contract.

If you are that price-sensitive, then I'd strongly recommend you think carefully about whether you really need a gigabit, or whether 500M or 300M would do the job for you. These could save you £60 or £120 per year respectively.

I have 300M from Aquiss, and I'd choose this over 900M from the likes of BT any day. At 300M I can download a 1.5GB macOS update in 40 seconds, but it still takes 15 or 20 minutes to install.

The next level down, 150M, is only £3 per month cheaper.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Aquiss is also half-price for first 6 months, with no setup fee, which makes it very good value for the first year - effectively 12 months for the price of 9.

Or are they half price for three months?
https://www.aquiss.net/unlimited-fttp-fibre-broadban... I wonder if we can find better than six months half price somewhere in the country!

I'm not so price sensitive. I started on the assumption Zen were more expensive than the rest. I'm pretty sure that was true 10 or 12 years ago. I'm willing to pay an extra tenner for a good service so on that basis though the others must be around £45 and with so many people saying the likes of Aquiss and IDNet are good I'd be willing to save a tenner!

For download, no, I don't really need a gigabit service. 300 MB would be fine for me too but it's only 45 up and it's the upload speed I'm buying for.

In reply to a post by Woolwich:

Or are they half price for three months?

No: https://www.aquiss.net/unlimited-fttp-fibre-broadband/

(I have no idea how you get to that Glasgow page... I just followed the Home Broadband link from their home page, followed by Full Fibre)

Edited by candlerb (Tue 13-Feb-24 18:52:03)

In reply to a post by candlerb:

I have no idea how you get to that Glasgow page...

It was a bit tongue in cheek. However the page exists along with pages for lots of major towns, cities and counties. A quick scan and they al appear to offer three months half price. I'm going to suggest they're there as bait for Google for those searching for something like "FTTP in <Name of Town>".

The pages are linked from the 'sitemap' (which is all the sitemap has...).
https://www.aquiss.net/sitemap/

Id be more willing to spend an extra few quid as well for good customer service.

Ah I see: looks like an attempt to capture search engine terms.

It links to the normal ordering page so they should get the right deal. Still, would be better if they fixed all these.

In reply to a post by bobble_bob:

Id be more willing to spend an extra few quid as well for good customer service.

There are more than a few threads on this site saying that Zen's customer service are poor/unresponsive.

To be fair, there are others that praise them.

Edited by Rhynchelma (Wed 14-Feb-24 19:00:14)

In reply to a post by candlerb:

Still, would be better if they fixed all these.

Already been noted following this thread and in the development/todo stack.

Read the last couple posts on this thread.

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/which_isp/f/475179...

1 user messages Zen of of hours on a Sunday afternoon and gets a response within an hour.
Another user messages on the Thursday before that, during working hours. They took till Tuesday to answer.

Some would think Thursday to Tuesday is a good enough response time. My thoughts are why ignore 1 ticket for 5 days but answer another within the hour.
If the Thursday ticket was more complex then respond saying we need to look in to that.

I think there's an issue with how Zen queue tickets. My last few tickets went completely unanswered (granted it was a while ago now) so I left. No idea if tickets just get lost or if agents read them and just don't respond, leaving a ticket in limbo.

I was with Zen specifically for email/ticket/text based support and they fell short imo.

Can be legit reasons. In my workplace we have a 3 working day rule to respond. Sometimes i will respond within minutes of an email if you catch me when its quiet. Othertimes if im busy its a day or so

This is a general point, not Zen-specific...

I've never really understood why most firms seem to de-prioritise email so much. The same ISP that answers a telephone call more-or-less instantly will take several days to answer a question asked over email. Why?

When I was involved in tech support, I found that I could generally reply to a emailed query in less time than it took to do so in a phone call, and often sent that reply within minutes, not days. Customers seemed to like this level of responsiveness, so I wonder why more firms don't try it.

At a guess you cant really ignore a phone call (well unless you dont answer the phone but that in general isnt accepted).

We treat both equally although we prefer to do our business over email as its easier due to the nature of the work. Sometimes though you have other priorities, priorities that means emails may have to wait a day or 2. But again you cant really priorities other tasks when a call comes in

I used to be with Zen, and had probably been with them for close to 20 years.

The best thing about them was that you rarely needed support. Their network is solid, with the exception of some single thread download speed issues.

If you call, someone generally answered. You call if it's urgent, and email if it's not.

I moved away to an Altnet to get a Gig connection. But Cityfibre are building here right now, so when it's available I'll probably go back to Zen with the CF fibre.

one thing my father told me years ago(he's been dead 41 yrs!)was:-
you remember the quality long after the price is forgotten, looking for cheapest may not be best option!
I find if you ever have an issue,normally self inflicted using their network,Idnet have a superb support system by phone or email!

My experience with Zen has been wholly positive. There seem to be four tiers of ISP:
- The big three (the BT companies, TalkTalk and Sky)
- The not-quite-so-big - Zen (and who else?)
- The quality-rather-bargain-basement-service - A&A, Aquiss etc
- Random AltNets - Upp (RIP) and the like

I went with Zen - more expensive than Sky, cheaper than A&A. They liaised with Openreach better than Sky had done - mine was a difficult FTTP install. Sky kept cancelling the order, Zen seemed to be able to hassle Openreach until it was fulfilled. Zen's offering is tempting - no in-contract price rises, simple VOIP offering (keeping my old analogue telephone number), good router, plenty of updates by phone and email about how my install went. And, like every other FTTP service, rock-solid reliability.

Costs more than Sky - but that extra cost is about the price of a pint a month in the pub or an hour or two's gas consumption!

I just haggled an excellent retention deal from Zen for the 900/100 plus voip.Not going to give the price I got because that's for everybody to try. I will only say, cheaper than Sky.
I do have Youfibre available here though so that's some tough competition.