(I'm seeing) No congestion on Zen

I came back to Zen a few months ago from AAISP purely on price grounds. Anyway, despite having an initial moan back in January due to packet loss, after those problems went away, I have seen no congestion. In fact, downloads are generally faster with Zen than they were with AAISP (only marginally).

Speedtest on Zen right now: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html... (other people using the internet too)

It is like that practically all of the time, and if it wasn't I would have noticed and been moaning in no time.

Anyway, I thought it would be only fair to post this so it doesn't look like the entire customer base is having issues.

Edited by Pipexer (Sun 01-May-16 19:17:49)

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Things have shown an improvement this past week,following some upgrade work in London on their core network , the week before that however i started experiencing to some degree what others had been seeing for a longer time,
As a customer of zen who has BTW for backhaul this can sometimes complicate who is responsible BT or Zen

In reply to a post by tommy45:

As a customer of zen who has BTW for backhaul this can sometimes complicate who is responsible BT or Zen

Zen is responsible - as far as you are concerned. It is their problem getting BTW/OR to sort things out. Unfortunately they are not able to raise enough enthusiasm to get things sorted. There seems to be no-one at Zen who is prepared to shout at the BT behemoth. That used to be what people went to AAISP to get done. They weren't frightened to hold BT to account.

exactly, tang rolled over and forgot all the loyal customers that signed up back in the day and the reason why. there was no need for aaisp back then.

In reply to a post by ukwiz:

In reply to a post by tommy45:

As a customer of zen who has BTW for backhaul this can sometimes complicate who is responsible BT or Zen

Zen is responsible - as far as you are concerned. It is their problem getting BTW/OR to sort things out. Unfortunately they are not able to raise enough enthusiasm to get things sorted. There seems to be no-one at Zen who is prepared to shout at the BT behemoth. That used to be what people went to AAISP to get done. They weren't frightened to hold BT to account.

Well i have had peak time congestion in the evenings in the past 12mths twice, and both times Zen sorted it out, and both times it was BTW's overloaded Svlan's
Though admittedly it could of been made a little easier by Zen , But i suppose that is in part down to BTW & them trying to wriggle at every opportunity,But onve Zen are satisfied they have enough evidence that there are throughput issues they raise with BT
They then seem happy enough to pester BT , well that's from my own experience
And had i been still been with minus-net, the problem would of never been fixed most likely because they wouldn't have raised it with BT or just accepted BT's wriggling off the hook excuses

Edited by tommy45 (Sun 08-May-16 20:06:02)

This is as good as I get:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

I agree i think my speed at 3 miles from my exchange is as good as it gets when you take into account i was only getting 4mbps a few day ago on adsl2
however i should add i'm 300 meters from the VDSL cabinet on our estate

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

I notice from your sig you have IPv6 enabled, just wondering if you are seeing any ping oddities, I have a case open for packet loss, I have had to be quite firm with support as they keep trying to close my case.

This is what I see on a bad (ish day)

My Broadband Ping

This how my line used to be:

My Broadband Ping

I know there isn't *massive* amounts of packet loss but it's enough to disrupt VoIP and VPN connections (my work demands these two things work and work well - hence Zen) it runs about 0.6% over a day, this doesn't sound a lot but it is worse between 9am and 10pm.

Alas I have had peak time congestion here in Tavistock ever since I upgraded to VDSL2 back in November. It did get better after the recent Zen upgrades but then quickly reverted back to slow single thread performance once again.

The quality of my Zen VDSL2 broadband has always been superb between midnight and the start of the working day.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

After over 10 years of being a very happy Zen customer I am now counting the days down to November when I can migrate to one of the few remaining broadband suppliers who are willing to put effort into maintaining the quality of service that Zen used to provide.

Godfrey

In reply to a post by bigbadpirate:

exactly, tang rolled over and forgot all the loyal customers that signed up back in the day and the reason why. there was no need for aaisp back then.

Whilst flippant in tone, I do get the impression that Richard Tang isn't as connected to the customers and experience they get anymore as he once was. Sort of inevitable when you grow sadly.

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

I came back to Zen a few months ago from AAISP purely on price grounds. Anyway, despite having an initial moan back in January due to packet loss, after those problems went away, I have seen no congestion. In fact, downloads are generally faster with Zen than they were with AAISP (only marginally).

Speedtest on Zen right now: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html... (other people using the internet too)

It is like that practically all of the time, and if it wasn't I would have noticed and been moaning in no time.

Anyway, I thought it would be only fair to post this so it doesn't look like the entire customer base is having issues.

you are right my friend the overall standard at zen over the past 15 years i have been with them as been excellent with the staff very helpful

however my overall feelings on Richard tang the chief executive are not so great and am unsure as to how this has come about

maybe it is his extreme shyness with a complete lack of concern for any of his customers

I have never known his staff ever say anything positive about him and I've never met at a local level any person with any awareness of zen much to my surprise

anyhow as for faster speeds zen overall are the best at keeping their company a secret which in turn keeps the business model at a friendly personable level and the service high

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Edited by NICK_ADSL_UK (Thu 19-May-16 11:46:58)

In reply to a post by NICK_ADSL_UK:

In reply to a post by Pipexer:

I came back to Zen a few months ago from AAISP purely on price grounds. Anyway, despite having an initial moan back in January due to packet loss, after those problems went away, I have seen no congestion. In fact, downloads are generally faster with Zen than they were with AAISP (only marginally).

Speedtest on Zen right now: http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html... (other people using the internet too)

It is like that practically all of the time, and if it wasn't I would have noticed and been moaning in no time.

Anyway, I thought it would be only fair to post this so it doesn't look like the entire customer base is having issues.

you are right my friend the overall standard at zen over the past 15 years i have been with them as been excellent with the staff very helpful

however my overall feelings on Richard tang the chief executive are not so great and am unsure as to how this has come about

maybe it is his extreme shyness with a complete lack of concern for any of his customers

I have never known his staff ever say anything positive about him and I've never met at a local level any person with any awareness of zen much to my surprise

anyhow as for faster speeds zen overall are the best at keeping their company a secret which in turn keeps the business model at a friendly personable level and the service high

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Richard Tang is amazing, as a person from Rochdale and a former employee of his, he always had time to talk to me, often would crack jokes and always was genuinely interested in all of his staff as individuals.

My fear is there have been rounds of redundancy, Zen have got a lot bigger than they were when I worked there and they have divided support up into different sectors (home, busines, etc) and I fear that the residential support isn't up to the job, I had to kick, scream and stamp quite a lot to talk to someone who understood me.

My issues seem different to everyone elses, my speeds are fine but I have an amount of pacet loss which is becoming somewhat annoying.

I might have to move, to where, I'm not sure, but I'll give them a chance to fix it first.

I'm finding single-threaded performance fluctuates quite wildly on Zen and has done since I joined, or possibly it was since I had IPv6 enabled (which they completely failed to get working on my line mind you so its disabled on my network now).

Initially I was overjoyed as its many times better than Origin Broadband, their single thread performance has been rubbish all the time I was with them, on Digital Region and BT. Its only as Zen have slowly deteriorated I have become concerned, especially hearing people claim no issues on other ISPs.

One thing, eing in the north on a Zen LLU exchange I'm routing through Manchester rather than London which seems to have had much less issues than people using the London POP.

Edited by alexatkin (Thu 19-May-16 20:57:48)

joy at last !!!

Post deleted by bet_here

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...
that's about as good as it gets i think from my home to the exchange at 3 miles

In reply to a post by NICK_ADSL_UK:

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...
that's about as good as it gets i think from my home to the exchange at 3 miles

3 miles to the exchange maybe, but with the speeds you are getting, and assuming you have FTTC, then your cabinet is surely a stones throw away?

Yes the cabinet on the estate is around 300 meters away from my home. my friend lives just 5 meters from the cabinet (lol)

Edited by NICK_ADSL_UK (Sat 28-May-16 13:48:35)

Just been reading this thread with interest as whilst I'm still with Idnet and have been for several years I did move back and forth to Zen some years ago.
Back then Zen had a different feel particularly when you rang them. But after a recent call to their sales department first navigating through the various menus I found the company to be cold for want of a better word.
I have no doubt the quality is still there, but as others have said it's what tends to happen when companies grow. It's great that they've done well and no doubt hard work has achieved that.
The only thing that seems a relic of the past now is their products page/s which I find messy and not as clear or informative as they could be.

In reply to a post by Vorlon:

I have no doubt the quality is still there, but as others have said it's what tends to happen when companies grow. It's great that they've done well and no doubt hard work has achieved that.

Given the effort it took for Zen to accept that there's a large problem somewhere (and the excuses they gave initially) I would very much disagree with that. It's also taken them at least 6 months to fix this problem with absolutely no resolution so far, and absolutely no information for quite some time (there was a Zen employee who would post bits and pieces but even he seems to have gone silent)

Edited by deleted (Wed 01-Jun-16 06:17:04)

Well, after a wireless access point upgrade I get this connecting wirelessly;

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5386754873

I'm not using the TBB speed checker as I'm on OS X. Ping on that particular server is high. Via wireless I consistently get <10ms ping to www.bbc.co.uk and it's as low as 4ms from the router itself.

BQM result

Variations in latency are due to the fact I run servers on the connection and at times the connection can be heavily loaded. I have scheduled file transfers between two sites every fifteen minutes as well.