Lightspeed coming to my area

Long term customer of Zen here.
Currently living in an area limited to either VM or Openreach FTTC. As I type Lightspeed is in the middle of bulding around my area and there is a lovely loop of fibre optic cable hooked over the telegraph pole outside my window waiting to be joined up to the ducting.
And no signs of the Openreach FFTP starting any time soon.
So... Other users experience with lightspeed? I'm particularly interested to know if anyones had any issues with their contract buyout scheme as I'm just under a year into an 18 month contract with Zen.

And Zen don't/aren't going to have a wholesale agreementh with Lightspeed?

Your query might be better suited to being posted here ….

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/otherisp.html

… and the query about Zen in their ISP specific section.

We are currently in the process of moving away from Virgin Media to Lightspeed, we have 6 months remaining with Virgin Media and have received plenty of emails from Lightspeed regarding the details required for contract buy out. They have since hung a loop of fibre from my nearest pole to serve me (they needed a cherry picker for my pole due to the amount of cables on it). Install happens fairly soon and once we have the final bill from Virgin Media I will send that onto LightSpeed to get the buyout sorted. Their telephone agents are really really helpful and walked us through everything in depth without pressure so was nice compared to Virgin Media who keep sending sales reps here and knocking on our door despite us already having it installed.

Very reassuring thanks.
I did see one negative post about them elsewhere, but otherwise everyones got good things to say, and that negative post was about a new customer not getting an Eero router as advertised (perhaps sales outstripping their supply or they still have a load of their old ones to get rid of) but thats not a dealbreaker for me as I'd rather have my own choice of router anyway.
So now just waiting for it to go live.

I’m curious to follow this thread. I’m also a long term Zen customer (2003 I think). Lightspeed and Gigaclear are both available now. Gigaclear is a little cheaper but their price more than doubles after the 18 month contract which really puts me off. I’ve seen some Openreach fibre works going on in other areas of town but nothing in my area yet.

An update on Lightspeed, the install went ahead as expected and Virgin had disconnected our old service the day after, I received a final bill from Virgin a few days after that (there was a weekend in between) and sent that to Lightspeed via their form, we got a response from the relevant department very very quickly saying they would pay this out once they had received our first payment, the money for the buyout landed in our account 48 hours after the first bill was paid and is there ready to pay off the final amount to Virgin when the final direct debit goes out to them. I have sent the old Hub 5x back in the packaging Virgin sent us and await confirmation that has been received. All in all Lightspeed have delivered well for us and saved us a lot of money for an even faster package.

Good to hear everything went smoothly. I've just placed an order which is booked to install on the 1st August. I was surprised to read this on the email though

"An important note about your switch

One Touch Switch is not included in your order.

By accepting the contract summary terms, you agree to cancel your contract with your current provider once your installation with LightSpeed is complete.

We recommend doing this as soon as your new service is up and running to avoid any overlap or extra charges."


I was under the impression that Lightspeed used the switching sevice. My existing broadband and phone services are with different providers so I wonder if that was why it isn't included

Did you get any emails from your old provider during the ordering process as if you did then OTS has been used. Maybe OTS wasn't used because of the complexity of that kind of switch with separate broadband and phone providers, despite OTS as far as I know being able to find a way to handle that. I'll have to go through the old emails we got from Lightspeed when we ordered it.

No, haven’t heard anything from Zen. Not really an issue though. At least I know there will be no downtime since I can make sure Lightspeed is all up and running before cancelling Zen