Contract renewal email surprise

Email received from Zen to say that my full fibre 900 contract expires in 70 days and offering the option of moving on to a rolling monthly contract for the same, £40 p/m, or committing to a new 18-month contract for £40 p/m plus £9.95 one-off charge.
Then right at the end it offers 'our faster alternative product, otherwise known as Full Fibre Max!
I'm on the CityFibre network. For 18-months the price is 'from £55 p/m' plus £9.95 one-off charge.
I'll email them and see what they say.

Maybe I should upgrade to the 2.5gbe service then just have a bot doing speedtests on london servers all day while they have me in the south connected via Manchester until they actually do something about it?

If you're interested in the Max service, I suggest you look carefully into the two eero routers they offer. If one of them is suitable for you then OK, but you may be happier with an alternative 2.5gGb router. of which there are many on the market.
My reasons for avoiding them, when Max finally arrives for me:
The "6" has only one 2.5Gb port, so no 2.5G Ethernet connection.
The "7" costs an extra £10/month.
Neither has a USB3 port.
Router configuration options are very limited.
Both require a sign up to Amazon, who will be aware of all your internet traffic.

Edited by cjn (Wed 29-Jan-25 22:44:17)

In reply to a post by ParksidePeter:

Email received from Zen to say that my full fibre 900 contract expires in 70 days and offering the option of moving on to a rolling monthly contract for the same, £40 p/m, or committing to a new 18-month contract for £40 p/m plus £9.95 one-off charge.

On the face of it, that doesn't sound like a great deal: you have to pay £10 just so that they guarantee not to raise the price for the next 18 months (and also you lose the option to leave)

Have said that, the deal you're currently on is good and might be worth locking in if you're definitely not moving in the next 18 months.

In reply to a post by ParksidePeter:

Then right at the end it offers 'our faster alternative product, otherwise known as Full Fibre Max!
I'm on the CityFibre network. For 18-months the price is 'from £55 p/m' plus £9.95 one-off charge.
I'll email them and see what they say.

How often do you hit the ceiling of a 900M connection?

There's quite a lot that needs upgrading your side you take advantage of anything faster - including 2.5G wired connections to your PCs or gaming machines - and on wireless you're highly unlikely to notice any difference, even with the latest chipsets.

Even at 900M, I expect you find it already takes far longer to install software updates or games than it takes to download them.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

There's quite a lot that needs upgrading your side you take advantage of anything faster - including 2.5G wired connections to your PCs or gaming machines - and on wireless you're highly unlikely to notice any difference, even with the latest chipsets.

I think this is probably why they include the router in the package. They know most home setups won't handle it as-is. Although the 6E pro seems to make a huge assumption that users are mostly using wifi. One 2.5 and one gigabit gimps the setup from the start.

In reply to a post by cjn:

If you're interested in the Max service, I suggest you look carefully into the two eero routers they offer. If one of them is suitable for you then OK, but you may be happier with an alternative 2.5gGb router. of which there are many on the market.
My reasons for avoiding them, when Max finally arrives for me:
The "6" has only one 2.5Gb port, so no 2.5G Ethernet connection.
The "7" costs an extra £10/month.
Neither has a USB3 port.
Router configuration options are very limited.
Both require a sign up to Amazon, who will be aware of all your internet traffic.

I'm not bothered about the router as I have a very capable Asus RT-BE88U, which has four 2.5Gb ports, plus 4 x 1Gb and 2 x 10Gb (one of them SFP).

In reply to a post by candlerb:

In reply to a post by ParksidePeter:

How often do you hit the ceiling of a 900M connection?

I have no idea how often I max out the 900Mb connection, if ever. It's not a matter of need but of want.

There's quite a lot that needs upgrading your side you take advantage of anything faster - including 2.5G wired connections to your PCs or gaming machines - and on wireless you're highly unlikely to notice any difference, even with the latest chipsets.

My network is already running at 2.5Gb.

Getting rather p###ed off with Zen.

I received an email promoting Full Fibre Max, which only mentioned what would be XGS-PON speeds, i.e. symmetric 2.5/2.5. I called them to go ahead and was told that not accepting either of their eero routers wouldn't change the price. OK, no problem, go ahead for £9.95 setup and £55/month.

After the adviser went away for a while she came back to say that the speeds would be capped to 1800/900, i.e. G-PON, agreeing that the full service would await CityFibre implementing XGS-PON at some unspecified future time.

So they haven't exactly done themselves any favours here. She promised to pass on to management my criticism of their router offering and their misleading advertising of this new service.

Another little issue: after the end of the 18-month contract they will be adopting the widespread CPI ripoff. I wonder how soon they'll be sticking this to 900/900 users out of contract.

In reply to a post by cjn:

Getting rather p###ed off with Zen.

I received an email promoting Full Fibre Max, which only mentioned what would be XGS-PON speeds, i.e. symmetric 2.5/2.5. I called them to go ahead and was told that not accepting either of their eero routers wouldn't change the price. OK, no problem, go ahead for £9.95 setup and £55/month.

I received the same email and realised that my Zen contract expires in two weeks so I called Briant Broadband and switch on 21st, £49,99 a month for two years. I never thought to confirm that it will be an XGS-PON connection, they are promoting 2.5Gb heavily, so we could be in for an interesting conversation. Their router is the tp-link Aginet EX820v, which I don't intend to use, and they make a £30 connection charge.

I had a look at their website, where they don't promote anything >1Gb. However, entering my postcode produced a quote for 2.0Gb, with 2000/1000 asymmetric. So it's bound to be G-PON, at least for my postcode, and more or less the same as Zen. No mention of 2.5Gb for me.

In reply to a post by cjn:

I had a look at their website, where they don't promote anything >1Gb. However, entering my postcode produced a quote for 2.0Gb, with 2000/1000 asymmetric. So it's bound to be G-PON, at least for my postcode, and more or less the same as Zen. No mention of 2.5Gb for me.

For my address they offer 150Mb, 500Mb, 1Gb, 1.2Gb and 2.5Gb

Edited by ParksidePeter (Fri 07-Feb-25 15:53:05)

Good for you!
I've told Zen not to bother contacting me again until CF have updated their network.

In reply to a post by cjn:

Good for you!
I've told Zen not to bother contacting me again until CF have updated their network.

21st February is the changeover day, one day before my Zen contract expires. The 'We're sorry you are leaving' email arrived at the same time as the confirmation of order email from Briant. I hadn't contacted Zen.
I'll report back on 21st.

I was looking at the cityfibre max option again today and I noticed something a little odd.

When they line up all the services I can get there is Full fibre 100, 500, 900 and max.

100, 500 and 900 all have a bullet point promising the static IP address that Zen is known for.

But under the max product this is mysteriously replaced with "No-holds barred broadband" which is not explained anywhere I can see.

Now I can imagine a few reasons they might not want to give you an unrestricted static IP with 2.5gbe upload. That's more than most datacentres will give you without pricey enterprise packages. But, would they really implement it in such a sneaky way?

I would hope not.

It seems extremely unlikely to me that they would give a worse spec for the top-of-the-range product.

But if that's the product you want to buy, and you want to be 100% sure, then you can raise a query before placing the order.

In reply to a post by agent_r00t:

Now I can imagine a few reasons they might not want to give you an unrestricted static IP with 2.5gbe upload.

Eh? Either they will give you a static IP or they won't. If they will give you one, it is no further skin off their nose to allow it on the fastest package than it would be to allow it on their most entry level product.

In reply to a post by DFScale:

Eh? Either they will give you a static IP or they won't. If they will give you one, it is no further skin off their nose to allow it on the fastest package than it would be to allow it on their most entry level product.

I was thinking more that some people might well make use of it to host higher traffic sites from. Since getting >1gbit in a datacentre can be pricey to say the least.

Overall I just felt it was a very weird omission.

In reply to a post by candlerb:

It seems extremely unlikely to me that they would give a worse spec for the top-of-the-range product.

But if that's the product you want to buy, and you want to be 100% sure, then you can raise a query before placing the order.

No, I don't really have an interest right now. 1gbit is more than enough. I just thought the very specific omission was interesting enough to comment on.

I'd also really like to know what "no-holds barred" means in a broadband setting.

Marketing waffle.