Looks like Zen's web site is down inc their forums

Borked Zen web page Looks like Amazon wasn't such a good plan after all?
My throughput is somewhat erratic tonight I hate BTW They fail spectacularly in almost everything they do , how can the SVLAN's become congested so quickly ? looking like i will be looking into moving to an LLU service for my FTTC SMPF of course

In reply to a post by tommy45:

Borked Zen web page Looks like Amazon wasn't such a good plan after all?

You know I don't think that hosting your corporate site as a connectivity and hosting provider on someone else's infrastructure looks good at all. If anything, I have zero confidence that Zen would be a good choice for hosting if I was in the market for some.

It'd be like the Ferrari dealer arriving in a McLaren. It won't happen because it is a horrible statement of faith in the vendors own product.

I've only had my connection a few weeks and its been fraught with problems.
I went with Zen based on their reputation but they seem reluctant or unable to get BTW to provide the bandwidth Zen promise they will as part of their "Critical Care" package.

I too might have to look at an alternative soon if they dont sort my connection out.

It's Zen , not BTW.

I had FTTC and it just became too erratic to cope with. My TBB Monitor graph looked horrible with hours of high latency spikes and packet loss.

Even late evening when we were offline the graph appeared to show high usage or downloads taking place.

We live in a quiet area where there are a lot of pensioners, broadband and fibre uptake is quite low so the system is not stretched by any means.

I changed to Uno FTTC , and never see any issues 24/7.

This is the snapshot graph http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping/share/3e6de98316a... the red line was a modem reboot.

I'm also in an area with low uptake (words of Openreach Engineer who installed connection) but this makes me wonder if because of the low uptake the cabinet has the bare minimum of back-haul bandwidth back to the exchange. Be interesting to know what the lowest amount of bandwidth an FTTC cabinet can have is?

Was your Zen connection LLU?
Is your UNO connection LLU?
or
Were both connections provided via BT Wholesale network back-haul?

Lowest SFBB provisioned we've seen is 100Mb.

All our FTTC services are currently BT-only. This will change in the future to TTB also.

Matt

Both are BTW based.



Tracing route to echo.zen.co.uk [212.23.5.209]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms router.asus.com [192.168.1.1]
2 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms lo0.ar88.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.136.67]
3 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms be51.cr11.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.137.109]
4 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms be51.cr11.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.137.109]
5 10 ms 9 ms 9 ms 62.72.134.198
6 13 ms 12 ms 16 ms linx-1.zen.net.uk [195.66.224.158]
7 35 ms 15 ms 15 ms ge-3-0-0-0.cr1.wh-man.zen.net.uk [62.3.80.46]
8 19 ms 18 ms 15 ms ge-2-0-0-0.cr2.wh-man.zen.net.uk [62.3.80.50]
9 16 ms 15 ms 15 ms ae2-0.dr2.mbr-roch.zen.net.uk [62.3.80.54]
10 35 ms 15 ms 15 ms ae1-0.dr1.mbr-roch.zen.net.uk [62.3.80.66]
11 35 ms 15 ms 15 ms saussure.zen.co.uk [212.23.5.209]

Trace complete.


Tracing route to 1and1.co.uk [217.160.86.48]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms router.asus.com [192.168.1.1]
2 8 ms 8 ms 8 ms lo0.ar88.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.136.67]
3 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms be51.cr11.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.137.109]
4 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms be51.cr11.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.137.109]
5 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 62.72.134.198
6 17 ms 8 ms 12 ms linx.bb-c.the.lon.gb.oneandone.net [195.66.224.98]
7 9 ms 8 ms 9 ms order.1and1.co.uk [217.160.86.48]

Trace complete.

Tracing route to xilo.net [91.199.78.229]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms router.asus.com [192.168.1.1]
2 9 ms 8 ms 9 ms lo0.ar88.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.136.67]
3 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms be51.cr11.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.137.109]
4 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms be51.cr11.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.137.109]
5 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms 62.72.134.198
6 16 ms 9 ms 10 ms ae-1.r22.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net [195.66.224.138]
7 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms ae-0.r23.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.4.86]
8 10 ms 9 ms 9 ms ae-7.r00.londen10.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.6.55]
9 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms core.a.rdg.everestdc.com [213.130.48.206]
10 10 ms 10 ms 30 ms ae-1.rtr-0.evr.rdg.uk.as44574.net [185.28.165.9]
11 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms ge-0-0-0.fw-c-0.evr.rdg.uk.as44574.net [91.199.78.1]
12 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms vip-www.xilo.net [91.199.78.229]

Trace complete.

Tracing route to uno.net.uk [91.199.78.226]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms router.asus.com [192.168.1.1]
2 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms lo0.ar88.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.136.67]
3 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms be51.cr11.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.137.109]
4 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms be51.cr11.tn5.bb.daisyplc.net [62.72.137.109]
5 14 ms 9 ms 9 ms 62.72.134.198
6 9 ms 8 ms 8 ms ae-1.r22.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net [195.66.224.138]
7 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms ae-0.r23.londen03.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.4.86]
8 9 ms 9 ms 9 ms ae-7.r00.londen10.uk.bb.gin.ntt.net [129.250.6.55]
9 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms core.a.rdg.everestdc.com [213.130.48.206]
10 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms ae-1.rtr-0.evr.rdg.uk.as44574.net [185.28.165.9]
11 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms ge-0-0-0.fw-c-0.evr.rdg.uk.as44574.net [91.199.78.1]
12 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms vip-www.uno.net.uk [91.199.78.226]

bear in mind is 3 different BTw products, which can affect congestion bottlenecks on the MSIL's.

On my traceroute I get this...
traceroute to echo.zen.co.uk (212.23.5.209), 64 hops max, 72 byte packets
1 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1) 0.627 ms 0.256 ms 0.206 ms
2 10.0.1.1 (10.0.1.1) 2.348 ms 1.890 ms 2.426 ms
3 losubs.subs.dsl1.wh-man.zen.net.uk (62.3.87.145) 28.752 ms 27.029 ms 27.530 ms
4 ae1-113.cr2.wh-man.zen.net.uk (62.3.80.229) 27.215 ms 27.155 ms 26.652 ms
5 ae2-0.dr2.mbr-roch.zen.net.uk (62.3.80.54) 30.015 ms 59.403 ms 27.723 ms
6 ae1-0.dr1.mbr-roch.zen.net.uk (62.3.80.66) 28.915 ms 27.126 ms 27.519 ms
7 saussure.zen.co.uk (212.23.5.209) 27.811 ms 28.221 ms 28.220 ms

Does the first external hop to losubs.subs.dsl1.wh-man.zen.net.uk indicate part of my Zen connection is in BTW control or that Zen are in control of all of it?

In reply to a post by craski:

Does the first external hop to losubs.subs.dsl1.wh-man.zen.net.uk indicate part of my Zen connection is in BTW control or that Zen are in control of all of it?

I believe so yes

Also you can look in the Zen portal, have a look at the Line stats page for test like "Your current line technology is WBMC."

I use Zen, saw your post so tried logging into my Customer Portal just to see. Straight in, no problems at all. Getting full speed I pay for all the time so perhaps not Zen per se?

When I ws with Zen I saw a few issues in relation to bandwidth and packet loss!

I was LLU though... During the day I would see congestion like issues... I always put this down to heavy usage by other businesses perhaps but then I started seeing issues with packet loss on my graphs and that it could be noticed at home also.

Zen where looking into it but nothing really came of it, one night it looked like Zen restarted a router or something somewhere and that cleared up the packet loss for a few days but then it returned,

I then lost interest due to moving home at which point me & Zen had a big falling out over outrageous moving costs.

The Zen site was down for a short time last night, first it showed the error in my ss, then a proper announcement about it being in accessible followed shortly afterwards by the site working again

The throughput issues i have seen so far since being with zen have been down to BTW and their poxy mismanaged back haul and SVLAN's or other parts of it's wbmc SHARED service

And twice Zen has sorted this with BT, problem is ,the same [censored] returns again and again, be it a few weeks later or a couple of months later

Edited by tommy45 (Wed 13-Jan-16 16:08:04)

In reply to a post by tommy45:

And twice Zen has sorted this with BT, problem is ,the same [censored] returns again and again, be it a few weeks later or a couple of months later

This doesnt bode well for areas with no alternatives. It does seem to be a bit of an ongoing saga to get a good service while many others glory on with no issues. Without the bigger picture of how BT / Openreach are managing network capacity it is frustrating. Its a shame they are not forced to publish that information.

There are alternatives as such both TT and Sky have their kit in my exchange, But it's when you want to maintain SMPF so only data is via their LLU kit, the choice becomes very limited thank's to the race to the bottom mass market isp's and their bundling bs

Pulse8 are happy to do SMPF - No contract tie-in and decent customer service.

Amazon have mentioned 14 companies who have gone all-in with AWS, abandoning their own data centres
http://static5.uk.businessinsider.com/image/5696bec2...

In reply to a post by professor973:

Pulse8 are happy to do SMPF - No contract tie-in and decent customer service.

Well before i migrated to Zen i enquired at pulse8 and they were adamant that it would be MPF As TT are in my exchange , However if this has changed which i doubt as line rental is only £6 when sold as a bundle i would possibly be interested , except for their fees even though it would be a migration of an active FTTC service that would not need any installation,

Edited by tommy45 (Wed 13-Jan-16 22:28:55)

Well assuming zen are using WBMC shared. Then you got 2 options.

1 - wait it out, plusnet are shifting their customers onto another WBMC product, since they are by far the biggest isp using WBMC shared, then this will free up capacity and I expect congestion issues will go away, obviously I got no idea of how long it will take plusnet to move all their customers, or at least enough to stop the congestion.
2 - Ditch BTw and use a isp with their own backhaul, which is either entanet, talktalk (talktalk resellers of ttb recommended) or sky.

I think all the issues that put you off pulse8 are trivial minor one's. I would go with one of these 3.

aaisp ttb resold
pulse8 ttb resold
sky

Also its good sense to use someone else's network for the website, as if zen's network ever goes down the first thing their customers may do is look for a status update on zen's website or contact details.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 14-Jan-16 05:37:48)