Zen FTTP would you recommend

Hi, I have spoken to BT openreach guys in our street and they have said that we should be able to order FTTP in a couple of months. We are currently with Sky fibre and get approx 64 down 10 up. I was wondering - what kind of speeds could we get?

How is Zen as an ISP ? We are probably classed as a Heavy usage family of 4, with lots of consumption. Also is it truly unlimited i.e no throttling or limitations. I do have to use VPN for some of the things we do i.e torrents and streaming at the weekend but apart from that its pc gaming, consoles, tablets, netflix etc etc thelist goes on

All honest and open feedback appreciated. I must admit, Sky have been pretty good for our experience. No real outages or issues. But Zen used to have great reputation - is it still seen as the best ISP ??

Thanks

If you order a 40/10 FTTP service your speeds will drop
If you order a 80/20 FTTP service then speed tests at off peak should be around 76 Mbps down and 19.5 Mbps up
If you order faster then a similar difference from headline speeds.

Sky max speed option for FTTP is 160/30 at present, but Zen sell faster options if you want to jump the speeds a lot.

Have been with Zen for a long time, and their customer technical support for me has always been absolutely excellent.
My only recent dealings with anyone else was our for our Satelite TV with Sky... Not the same thing but I can state that their technical support was appalling / incompetent.
I have seen others reporting Zen have got worse lately, but I had a problem (for the first time in 3 years...) last Friday and they were again excellent.
We are upgrading to an FTTP connection, and not getting the performance we should - ie. 40mb on a 115mb contract. Zen support answered the phone in less than a minute and took us through a string of checks (basically linking direct to the BT box on the wall rather than through our router, with a variety of cables...) and organised Openreach to come back out today. Unfortunately Openreach have not turned up... but I assume that is them, not Zen.
So I would recommend Zen,

Zen customer for over 6 and a half years.

ADSL from March 2014 to January 2018 and FTTP from January 2018

They were very quick when I had ADSL issues, FTTP has been trouble free so far (and I've been completely dependent on it as I've been working from home since March.)

Get exactly the speed I pay for.

Always found them pleasant to deal with on the rare occasions I've had to call.

There are faster and cheaper but I'm glad I went FTTP with Zen.

Been with Zen On FTTP for ~ 5 years. Previously was with bt (only because it was the only way to get FTTP but that's a different issue!).

On the plus side when our customers Zen FTTC circuits have had an outage last 2-3 times the FTTP circuits with zen have stayed up so its not routed in the same way and must be using some of the openreach/wholesale resilance. Zen have a single connection to their LLU at our exchange so when FTTC goes down its down for hours typically.

Speed wise get exactly what you pay for recently upgraded to 0.5GB and get exactly that. Use netflix and other streaming services and its spot on doing roughly ~700GB month last time looked.

One comment I will make is support ok not as good as it used to be imo but WAY better than the likes of bt/sky/etc.

Edited by deleted (Wed 16-Dec-20 08:59:49)

I've been with Zen on FTTP since April 2017. I've only got their 40mbps service but for what I use the connection for thats fne. According to my account stats, we use 241GB / month on average this year (max was about 355GB in October). We've been using it a fair bit more the last few months and I've pushed all the streaming [censored] over it (including Sky on-demand) instead of the BT connection which I'm using mainly for work.

In almost 4 years, the FTTP connection to the ONT has never dropped, although the Zen end of the connection has dropped in the early hours for what I assume is maintenance on their network.

In reply to a post by nazzer:

Also is it truly unlimited i.e no throttling or limitations. I do have to use VPN for some of the things we do i.e torrents

As far as I can work out they have (almost) none, I sit on a VPN all day long for work never had an issue. not had an issue with torrents ether.
The limitations I know of is they scan for open mail / dns gateways and will contact you asking you secure / close them. This IMHO is very good practice as they are a security risk.

I have been a customer of Zen's for just over 6 months, and am very happy with the service that I receive from them. The only issue that I have had was with poor download speeds after I regraded to Full Fibre 900 - this did take about a month to resolve, but it was not a straightforward issue, and they did keep on working on it until a resolution was found.

I was with Zen many moons ago, never had any problems that I recall. Recently joined Zen again for 100 meg FTTP. On the day of commencement the router wouldn't connect to Internet. Zen CS were absolutely fantastic. 3 CS reps got involved eventually, and they worked out that the static IP address had a conflict, and a new IP was assigned. Problem solved.

We are quite heavy users as well, VPN for work and spurious, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and many more subscriptions, many gaming consoles too, so unlimited, and no throttling suits fine. Cut to the chase, Zen is up there with the best.

https://www.thinkbroadband.com/_assets/speedtest/but...

I've been with Zen just over a year.

The one issue (fault with the line), was dealt with efficiently.

We are also a family of four with two teens and pretty heavy users (usual stuff). Average about 1.4TB download a month over the last year.

Never been an issue

Would definitely recommend.

We were on a fixed wireless service here for a few years (not spot) but we recently got FTTP and we went with Zen due to work of mouth reviews aswell as on here, very pleased.

We went with the 100M option in october and its been rock solid since. We also upgraded to a Deco Mesh wireless router and havent had any issues, we have the zen supplied router as a backup incase but they are totally fine with you using your own hardware (aslong as it can cope with the speeds).

As others have said there are probably faster/cheaper providers but for the quality of the customer service etc... I highly recommend Zen.

100% My FTTP 900 with Zen went live today and although I have not had much time with it, I am seeing full speeds so far. Also, Openreach had some issues getting this installed and Zen were easy to contact, helpful and called me back with updates.
Well worth the extra £.

How do you know no other (cheaper) provider wouldn't have got it sorted just as easily?

In reply to a post by woooshuk:

100% My FTTP 900 with Zen went live today and although I have not had much time with it, I am seeing full speeds so far.

Where abouts in the UK are you and what's your latency like? I've just signed up for FTTP 900 with Zen, though I think it will be a while before the service arrives...

In reply to a post by tboorman:

The only issue that I have had was with poor download speeds after I regraded to Full Fibre 900 - this did take about a month to resolve, but it was not a straightforward issue, and they did keep on working on it until a resolution was found.

Out of interest, what was the issue and the resolution?

In my experience it's been absolutely fine.

PS Not paying for the content you're consuming isn't cool, especially at a time when the arts, sports, etc, are under such pressure worldwide.

Zen had to enable the elevated traffic status feature for my circuit.

In reply to a post by CarlTSpeak:

PS Not paying for the content you're consuming isn't cool, especially at a time when the arts, sports, etc, are under such pressure worldwide.

I'm not entirely sure where that comment came from if it was aimed here...

In reply to a post by nazzer:

I do have to use VPN for some of the things we do i.e torrents and streaming at the weekend but apart from that its pc gaming, consoles, tablets, netflix etc etc thelist goes on

In reply to a post by Geordish:

In reply to a post by nazzer:

I do have to use VPN for some of the things we do i.e torrents and streaming at the weekend but apart from that its pc gaming, consoles, tablets, netflix etc etc thelist goes on

Ah got it, the formatting of this forum still gets me as I have it set to the flat view. I just now saw who the RE: was in your post, apologies.

I've got a list of subscriptions as long as my arm!