Don't forget that with Plusnet there is a £50 activation fee for "broadband only" and it is on an 18 month minimum term...also Plusnet broadband costs more than that advertised if one is not in a "low cost area", i.e. £29.49 for unlimited fibre.

Edited by 4M2 (Sun 13-Oct-13 14:49:07)

£10 month is pretty much nothing.

I know converting it to an annual figure is done to try and justify it as some large amount of money, but in reality compared to what you probably spend on food, drinks, petrol, gas, electric its not much and I am confused as you started of stating you are happy with zen the service is really good then say you cant find a reason to pay more, so the fact the service is very good for you is no such reason?.

Why dont you just say you are jumping on the "pay as least as possible for broadband as possible" wagon and be done with it

Putting it another way, you could take Zen's unlimited service, reduce the premium you currently pay over PlusNet by around 40%, enter into a 12 month commitment rather than the 18 months PlusNet demands, and avoid any new activation charges - and you still want to leave Zen.

It's up to you. Zen are never going to match PlusNet on price - I explained the differences in philosophy in my earlier post. If you want the advantages of Zen's service, you need to pay a modest price premium for it.

i moved from zen to sky due to service issues with pings and the fact zen seemed to be blaming BT nothing they could do etc, strange they have since changed policy and will now challenge bt however my experience with sky has only been positive i dl at 75-78 MBs never changes up loads at 16-18 again rock solid and my pings are faster and have been since day 1, i wouldnt discount sky tbh i did for a few years and have now realised i paid over the odds for not much else, on ADSL i would say Zen is safer but on fibre nah no way.

I moved from Zen to Vivaciti. My line is capable of 16.4 mbit download and the slowest download speed I have seen on Vivaciti is around 10 mbit (hourly testing). When I was on Zen on the Max Product I was quite often down to 1 mbit, no use for streaming. Having said that recently within the last few days Daisy must have increased capacity somewhere as I am getting solid 16.4 mbit on hourly testing. Just waiting for Fibre now.

In reply to a post by cssuk:

i moved from zen to sky due to service issues with pings and the fact zen seemed to be blaming BT nothing they could do etc, strange they have since changed policy and will now challenge bt however my experience with sky has only been positive i dl at 75-78 MBs never changes up loads at 16-18 again rock solid and my pings are faster and have been since day 1, i wouldnt discount sky tbh i did for a few years and have now realised i paid over the odds for not much else, on ADSL i would say Zen is safer but on fibre nah no way.

Issues with pings? ping is a program that tests round-trip time.

Not only do I dislike the colloquial use of 'ping' instead of 'latency' or 'round-trip time', as ping does not describe the measurement in question, you also fail to explain the issue you had. Was the problem with variable RTT (i.e. jitter) or excessive RTT to your chosen server(s), and which hop(s) on a traceroute were affected?


Zen over BT Wholesale is constrained by the internal architecture of the BT Wholesale network - this is an unavoidable consequence of using third-party backhaul. Zen have their own presence in 200 exchanges now - hopefully the number will grow over time. At the moment, Zen's own backhaul is used for FTTx only, though Phil Long has indicated an intention to provide ADSL2+ over this system in the future.



Sky are a perfectly good choice - but from a very different philosophical basis to Zen. If you want inexpensive no-frills connectivity with a bare minimum of technical support, Sky may well be a good choice. I doubt you'd get Sky to engage in a discussion about the finer points of their network engineering if you weren't happy with the service they were providing. Sky's network architecture and, on ADSL2+, their MSAN parameters are different to all their competitors - on some lines they will provide a faster and/or lower latency connection and on some they won't.

I've never understood tribalism when it comes to ISPs or any other communications or IT product. I will recommend services I use that I am happy with, but recognise that there are good alternatives, and that nobody else will balance the various factors in exactly the way I do.


The original question asked was "is Zen good enough to justify the price premium over PlusNet?". The only answer is "it depends on how you weigh the factors".

try the search button and all will be revealed, ping latency whatever its a measurement of round trip time to and from a server which is affected by many things including peer routing and contention, on Zens fibre although i live within 100 meters of my cabinet, had a brand new line and never a connection issue my ping's went from a reasonable 20 ms to my game server to 45+ almost overnight, turns out the interleaving had been activated on my line and it would have cost to have it reset, i maintained interleaving should never have been added but heels dug in and the eventual result was i left Zen, it seems they have now got steps in place to resolve those issues so perhaps something has worked, my point is i am still getting the lower ping's from sky i l play on a NL server and have 20-24ms ping and 4 less hops to get there UK servers its 16ms ping my DLs never slow nor do my ULs and i can use the connection however the hell i want no limits at all, i did 1.4 TBs last Month with watching on Demand DLs and not a squeak all for less than i paid Zen, i was a Zen customer for several years on ADSL and it was good but service did start to drop off as accountability seemed to drop off with the emphasis on the customer swapping routers etc before any resolution and it always seemed as if BT had to get involved and would charge if misdiagnosed, so based on my experience i replied to the OP no tribalism just a response i don't care who supplies my service as long as i get what i want from it and i am happy to pay the price required for it as well. anyway do a search the evidence is all there in black and white.

I know grammar comments are bad form - but please try some full stops and paragraph breaks. Your posts are very hard to read.

In reply to a post by cssuk:

try the search button and all will be revealed

I don't need to. As I stated in my earlier post, my issue was with the colloquial use of 'ping'. 'Ping' is the program used to measure latency / round-trip time - the name is an allusion to sonar and has been ascribed the disputed backronym of 'Packet InterNet Groper'. The quantity being measured is latency or round-trip time, not, I argue, "a ping".

In reply to a post by cssuk:

ping latency whatever its a measurement of round trip time to and from a server which is affected by many things including peer routing

Not really in the case you go on to talk about, which is first hop latency. OK - there are hidden steps within the backhaul network you can't see on most ISPs' systems (as the traffic is encapsulated in a tunneling protocol such as L2TP), but the routing between your router's WAN interface and the ISP's BRAS is likely to be constant no matter what the ultimate destination of the traffic.

In reply to a post by cssuk:

and contention

It's possible to see contention effects on first hop latency, but this is often less of an effect than bandwidth saturation on your own connection. Upstream saturation is a particular issue for ADSL, as the relatively narrow upstream is easy to drive into saturation.

In reply to a post by cssuk:

on Zens fibre although i live within 100 meters of my cabinet, had a brand new line and never a connection issue my ping's went from a reasonable 20 ms to my game server to 45+ almost overnight, turns out the interleaving had been activated on my line and it would have cost to have it reset, i maintained interleaving should never have been added but heels dug in and the eventual result was i left Zen, it seems they have now got steps in place to resolve those issues so perhaps something has worked, my point is i am still getting the lower ping's from sky

It makes no difference whether you're on Zen, Sky or any other ISP using the BT Openreach FTTC platform - they are all affected by the BT Openreach DLM equally. The only control the ISP has over DLM is to select one of three trade-offs between speed and stability.

It is likely there was some sort of one-off issue affecting your line when you were with Zen - maybe a thunderstorm. The FTTC DLM tends to back off relatively quickly, stepping down impulse noise protection and interleaving when it is no longer needed over a period of a few days to a few weeks. The only way to get an immediate reset is to pay for an engineer visit - but if you do that and the issue remains, the interleaving will go straight back on.


It is serendipity that you haven't had the issue with Sky - but if it happened with Zen, it might happen with Sky. Such are the perils of putting a high speed signal over a single twisted pair of wires.

In reply to a post by cssuk:

i l play on a NL server and have 20-24ms ping and 4 less hops to get there UK servers its 16ms ping

The number of hops shown on a traceroute or similar is completely irrelevant, not least as there may be additional steps that do not show up on traceroute.

I'm glad you found a solution that offers you the latency and jitter you desire to the servers you are interested in.

In reply to a post by cssuk:

my DLs never slow nor do my ULs and i can use the connection however the hell i want no limits at all, i did 1.4 TBs last Month with watching on Demand DLs and not a squeak all for less than i paid Zen,

Your connection will inevitably slow if you attempt to move enough traffic through it, as it has a finite speed. Moreover, at FTTC speeds, the limiting factor on data transfer speeds is often the far end, not your connection.

The latest Zen FTTC packages include unlimited options. New ADSL2+ packages cannot be too far away and I expect those to include unlimited options, too.

In reply to a post by cssuk:

i was a Zen customer for several years on ADSL and it was good but service did start to drop off as accountability seemed to drop off with the emphasis on the customer swapping routers etc before any resolution and it always seemed as if BT had to get involved and would charge if misdiagnosed,

I suspect what you perceived to be a change in Zen's approach was BT Openreach becoming more likely to levy a visit charge if no network side fault was found or the line performed within specification. Inevitably against that background, all ISPs will advise their customers to take straightforward steps to minimise the chance of being charged.

In reply to a post by cssuk:

so based on my experience i replied to the OP no tribalism just a response i don't care who supplies my service as long as i get what i want from it and i am happy to pay the price required for it as well.

As I said in my earlier reply, Sky do all you want for a low price - which makes them the right choice for you.

In reply to a post by cssuk:

anyway do a search the evidence is all there in black and white.

You seem to be assuming there's one right answer to "what is the best ISP?", and that you can Google for it. As I said in my earlier response, the answer depends on what factors matter to you and the weight you attach to them. Sky is no use if you want static IP, for instance (I know they're working on a static IP solution for Be customers, but it's not something you can buy today).

In reply to a post by David_W:

It is likely there was some sort of one-off issue affecting your line when you were with Zen - maybe a thunderstorm. The FTTC DLM tends to back off relatively quickly, stepping down impulse noise protection and interleaving when it is no longer needed over a period of a few days to a few weeks. The only way to get an immediate reset is to pay for an engineer visit - but if you do that and the issue remains, the interleaving will go straight back on.

I had a 'one-off' event a couple of weeks ago when I was away from home. I suspect that a local thunderstorm resulted in interleaving being switched on. The cumulative effect of this was a drop in downstream speed of 12Mbps and downstream INP of 3. Two weeks later, and almost to the minute, my box re-synched and I now have my usual FTTC speeds. Clearly, this situation was outwith any ISP's control.

Edited by lexden16 (Fri 18-Oct-13 09:01:25)

In reply to a post by David_W:

In reply to a post by cssuk:

on Zens fibre although i live within 100 meters of my cabinet, had a brand new line and never a connection issue my ping's went from a reasonable 20 ms to my game server to 45+ almost overnight, turns out the interleaving had been activated on my line and it would have cost to have it reset, i maintained interleaving should never have been added but heels dug in and the eventual result was i left Zen, it seems they have now got steps in place to resolve those issues so perhaps something has worked, my point is i am still getting the lower ping's from sky

It makes no difference whether you're on Zen, Sky or any other ISP using the BT Openreach FTTC platform - they are all affected by the BT Openreach DLM equally. The only control the ISP has over DLM is to select one of three trade-offs between speed and stability.

I thought I'd clarify what we discovered after this event. It is covered elsewhere in this forum, as it was the outcome of some comments here which led to us discovering an error in our provisioning on services linked to the POPs we use to provide FTTC via Openreach, without Wholesale.

Essentially during our investigations of cssuk's issue we saw the service was on "standard" which - on Wholesale - was the "best" profile for the situation. Wholesale translate "standard" to Openreach's "speed" (so the profile names match what they use for ADSL Max). When he was moved to one of our POPs the profile we ordered remained "standard" - however without Wholesale in the loop "standard" wasn't translated to "speed" anymore.

It was an oversight in our creation of services for those POPs - which I did uncover but too late to be of benefit here. As all of our systems and training expected "standard" to translate to "speed" there appeared to be no options available to us to resolve the issue without the chargeable visit; and as the line would have remained on Openreach's "standard" profile, not "speed", the outcome would have been as described.

It is something that's been addressed now - so all services are ordered on "Speed" if they're from Openreach and "Standard" from Wholesale. It's regrettable that we didn't spot this sooner to help cssuk, and I can only apologise for that.

In reply to a post by David_W:

I suspect what you perceived to be a change in Zen's approach was BT Openreach becoming more likely to levy a visit charge if no network side fault was found or the line performed within specification. Inevitably against that background, all ISPs will advise their customers to take straightforward steps to minimise the chance of being charged.

Wholesale and Openreach do pass on charges far more frequently then they have historically; which we in turn pass on to customers so we are keen to ensure that this doesn't happen and we have a strong case to dispute them if it does. Additionally our data shows that the vast majority of issues are solved through customer-premises diagnostics. So the reasons are twofold; to minimise the risk of charges and to deliver the quickest fix for most issues.

ta,
Phil.

Edited by deleted (Fri 18-Oct-13 10:01:56)