Migration to 21CN

My recent migration to 21CN went without a hitch if you accept 4 days of downtime as being acceptable. Not something requested by me and not something I am going to benefit from, but technology must move on. When I suggest a refund from Zen for the time without the service I pay them for, they say it is BT's fault. The whole point of paying an ISP is for a service provided by the ISP. Who is at fault for the ISP's inability to provide that service is no concern of mine. I shouldn't have to take it up with BT myself. I might as well pay BT directly and have them provide my broadband alongside my phone line? However, after the lack of interest too from BT I should ditch both... Not impressed.

Wouldn't be the first time BT have borked an upgrade.

When I was with another ISP and upgraded to ADSL Max a line card apparently failed and resisted attempts at both a restart and reseat.

It took BT a week to get a replacement card to the exchange and replace it.

To be fair to Zen, they are for better or worse dependent on BT but are the best in terms of service overall.

My advice would be to ring customer services and see what they can do as all in all in my experience at least they do everything they can to help.

There are a few helpful people from Zen that frequent these forums too.

Edited by techguy (Wed 29-Jun-11 10:28:05)

One other thing Dave.

If your line completely failed and you pay your line rental to someone other than Zen then you would indeed have to take it up with that provider instead because Zen can only deal with the data side unless you take out the talk product too.

posted FYI:

Ok thank you, we will have to agree to disagree on this one.

Zen advised me about an imminent change that should not even be noticeable but might have an effect for 15 minutes or so. 4 days was the resulting downtime meaning I'm then paying Zen for a service I'm no longer getting. The reasons I may not be getting the service are not my concern.

I find it unacceptable that I have to take ownership of the problem and talk to both Zen and BT to solve the problem. Therefore, as I have already said, it would be more efficient to have one provider for both broadband and phone services. For me, that provider will not be BT so as soon as my contract is up with BT in September, I shall investigate alternative arrangements.

I shall post this back to the forum so others can decide for themselves whether this procedure is acceptable when making choices about service provision.

In reply to a post by mickbzen:

Hi

Ive reviewed this for you and im afraid we wont be able to offer any kind of refund due to this reasons outlinned in the email from Sam.

Regards
Mick Bolton

I didn't say I agreed with it but thats the state of play in the UK at the minute and is not likely to change,

Any ISP cannot intervene in a complete line outage because your voice provider (whether that be BT Retail, Zen or whoever) rents the phyiscal copper loop from BT Wholesale, Zen only rent a virtual circuit comprising RF frequencies running over that copper.

Unless you have the same provider for both there is little an ISP can do if BT screw up an upgrade and take out your line completely, BT Wholesale will not take a repair order for a complete outage from anyone other than the company renting the physical copper.

Edited by techguy (Thu 30-Jun-11 17:44:22)

"there is little an ISP can do ..."

Yes thay can. They can refund you for not being able to provide the service they are contracted to provide. They can then seek to ensure they are not out of pocket themselves by putting a claim in against BT. Simply sitting in the middle of the ultimate provider and the user and saying 'nothing to do with us mate, you'll have to take it up with BT yourself' is poor.

As you intimate (and as I have said) - what is the point of having separate ISP and phone provider if both leave you to take the matter up with the other? Anyway, 4 days out of a month is no big deal but I'm busy enough and I pay companies to provide services so I don't have to spend time myself getting involved.

rgds,

I wholeheartedly agree the situation is completely nuts but thats the fault of our former monopoly telco and a regulator that puts the industry before the consumer.

I'm afraid I side with Zen on this one, the issue was beyond their control.

A situation such as yours is the reason I put the line that suppors my ADSL (and thats the only reason it is there) under their control so that if there is an issue, I only have to make one phone call and they can do all the diagnositcs and set Openreach in motion to fix it.

And no, I don't work for them but am an extremely satisfied customer.