PPP drips overnight

Any experiencing PPP dropping often overnight? DSL line stays up only PPP drops. Tech support just keep saying no issue your line is OK, which I know. I'm in South Wales area.

No maintenance shown on their status page or faults.

Wonder how wide spread this is. Seems to stay down for a number of hours. Would have thought they have some sort of resiliency to issues

I am in South Wales too, and I have not noticed any problems.

I've had dips via Zen that IDNet use, usually around 2:30am every few weeks (others have reported this as well, checkout the IDNet forum here). I put this down to load balancing because people are doing a gateway shuffle and over time the lower latency routes get too many on them. Dropping PPP for a swathe of customers and getting them to reconnect back up to random routes helps balance things back out. This used to be a common PlusNet problem years ago. They obviously don't want the negative publicity of putting this on their service status page as it happens so regularly and they hope most people are in bed and none the wiser.

Typically the connection is back up in seconds, but some routers don't handle the drop very well and you do sometimes get it where they don't connect up straight away or without a reboot.

Zen might charge more and their website is a bit less tacky with fewer promotions than PlusNet, but overall I think they have the same motivation and mantra, that spare capacity is wasted capacity, so there isn't much spare and micro managing gateways is their way of ringing out every last drop from their network. Zen by all means jump in and correct this if I'm wrong and give your explanation for these regular drop and why you never pre-warn or list them on your service status pages.

Note that a lot of other ISPs use Zen wholesale/backhaul (presumably because they are cheap) and in my experience the connection just behaves like a Zen connection, so if you move, check the company you move to doesn't use Zen, otherwise you gain nothing if your motivation to change is to get a something more robust.

Edited by E300 (Thu 18-Nov-21 16:30:57)

Way back when, in ADSLx days, Zen was primarily a business ISP, as IDNet was. Both only had BT Wholesale available.

In those days there was nothing approaching today's 24/7 online business internet use. Amazon itself only came into existence in 1994, as just a bookseller. It didn't start trading as that until July 1995, and didn't make a profit until a tiny one in the last quarter of 2001.

The rest is history.

My point here is that the business use that was Zen and IDNet's bread and butter was internal communications by biggish businesses and B2B trade. Mostly shutting down in the UK at 17:30 or so and not starting till 8am or later. Relatively little happening over the weekends too.

Because considerable bandwidth was needed during the day for this business stuff Zen and IDNet were paying a huge amount to BTW to have it sitting idle overnight and at weekends. Getting into the consumer market was the obvious way to get our money, at virtually no cost to them.

(With little on no night-time telephone or online support. To this day I don't think IDNet offer 24-hour or weekend consumer support. At least if they do I think it's only on social media. Zen I don't know).

The capacity available to a smallish consumer base was large, as their high pricing compared to the mass market deterred most people. Result - excellent speeds, latency and throughput. With the day-time support being highly trained and competent, as demanded by business users.

That business model has of course become non-viable these days. Their past reputation was justly earned, but the business and consumer markets are now much more savvy and demanding 24/7/365, with the consumer broadband market provision by BT/Plusnet/EE, Sky, TalkTalk and their various vISPs of generally high technical quality and reliability.

Support by real people generally for the consumer market these days I know little about as I rarely needed it and am now completely out of the landline-based market. But from what I experienced in my last few years with Plusnet then even AAISP before dropping the landline, and see on these forums, it is highly variable, with Zen and IDNet being two relative minnows in the consumer market beginning to struggle with staff costs to maintain their support and even broadband service levels.

In reply to a post by pluralist:

To this day I don't think IDNet offer 24-hour or weekend consumer support. At least if they do I think it's only on social media. Zen I don't know).

Bob

As ever, a helpful and insightful contribution. Just for the record, within the last 12 months IDNet have answered a telephone query from me at about 02:00 and their website now states:

"What are the Support hours?

"Support via phone is available 24/7 however some queries may only be able to be handled during our core office hours of 8am – 6.00pm Monday to Friday

"Support via email is available 24/7 at [email protected]"

Pity about the ongoing issues of Zen load-balancing (cause of my phone call) that are giving their reputation a knock.

Thanks for the extra info .

Do these drops in PPPoE session correlate with these historic maintenance windows ?https://servicealerts.zen.co.uk/archive/1

Could it be the Fritz!Box config? By default the Fritz!Box resets the connection every night (bouncing PPPoE) between 3 and 4 am.

You can disable this in the Internet > Account Information page under “Change Connection Settings” by unticking “Delay disconnection by provider”

Zen reposnded to my email. They found many users in same area as me expereinced a long outage that night. Seems to have been some maintenance locally that caused this.

Sadly this happened a number of times, typically when I'm actually working forcing me to resort to using hotspot on phone. If it was only down for a few minutes it would be fine, but it is typically down for a number of hours.

It is not Zen's fault if Openreach were carrying out maintenance in your area though. This would have affected all ISPs selling BT Wholesale packages.