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)