Zen Fibre GEA Migration

Hi All,

This morning I got a fright when I saw an update from Follow The Page, with the following:

+ There is currently a Broadband cease pending or in progress against
+ this line. This cease is due to complete by 5th September 2016. This
+ will not stop you ordering Broadband from a new supplier, but it will
+ delay the provision of the new Broadband service.

I logged onto the Zen portal to see what the hell is going on (I'm not cancelling, moving etc.) and I saw this is open orders:

Zen Fibre GEA Migration - Waiting for regrade - IN PROGRESS FOR 1 DAY

Can someone please explain what this is, and why I wasn't notified? Nearly had a heart attack and thought my account was compromised!

Cheers,
AP

This is a consequence of Zen now having their own backhaul available at the handover point for your FTTC or FTTP. When this happens, they migrate all customers from BT Wholesale's WBMC to their own backhaul (so Openreach GEA-FTTx plus Zen backhaul). Your contractual position remains unchanged. The likelihood is that your PPPoE connection will drop and re-establish automatically a few minutes later.

Thanks for the reply, hope that's it!

You could always ask Zen's legendary support...

In reply to a post by David_W:

This is a consequence of Zen now having their own backhaul available at the handover point for your FTTC or FTTP. When this happens, they migrate all customers from BT Wholesale's WBMC to their own backhaul (so Openreach GEA-FTTx plus Zen backhaul). Your contractual position remains unchanged. The likelihood is that your PPPoE connection will drop and re-establish automatically a few minutes later.

This happened to me earlier in the month. The only change is that the minimum latency has doubled from 8-9ms up to 18ms. Everything else is pretty much unchanged.

Tried that - it seems it's no longer legendary at all. Maybe they're getting too big.

You may have a while where you have no PPP session while it switches. But your sync will stay and you'll notice. I difference with your line stats as nothing changes at the cabinet end.

I'm getting higher latency too - but one other thing I noticed is that I had to reduce the MTU in order to visit some sites.

Google, Facebook and others were fine, but Apple, this forum for example weren't - reducing the MTU to 1472 worked, was at 1492 before.

Anything higher than 1972 it will do funny things.

I have no problems visiting this site with my Zen 'own network' connection set to MTU 1500 (I have an RFC 4638 enabled router - pfSense 2.3.2). Indeed, I had no problems in my pre-RFC 4638 days using MTU 1492 on the Zen network.

In reply to a post by rippedcotton:

In reply to a post by David_W:

This is a consequence of Zen now having their own backhaul available at the handover point for your FTTC or FTTP. When this happens, they migrate all customers from BT Wholesale's WBMC to their own backhaul (so Openreach GEA-FTTx plus Zen backhaul). Your contractual position remains unchanged. The likelihood is that your PPPoE connection will drop and re-establish automatically a few minutes later.

This happened to me earlier in the month. The only change is that the minimum latency has doubled from 8-9ms up to 18ms. Everything else is pretty much unchanged.

And it has now come back down again to the original 8ms, not quite sure what was done to achieve this, probably something in the internal bits of Zen or their suppliers.