In reply to a post by sor:

They didn't take it at all seriously until enough of us got angry, it seems

With all due respect, that is the way it works... normally. This is purely based on presumptions, which happens a lot in tech-support environments. Why should there be anything wrong if just one person is reporting issues? It's only when numerous customers do, which then suggests the problem is of a larger scope.

I admit, it is annoying, that they have possibly been this dismissive to begin with, but Jon Green has been very forthcoming with the information pertaining to this fault. He's even said to everyone concerned on this thread to open a support ticket - this helps them gauge the severity of the fault and possibly where it lies, as they have already disclosed that it appears to be quite an illusive fault, possibly consisting of several different compounding issues, and those are the worst to try and fault find for, especially when a 3rd party is involved like BT etc.

Also, I am personally amused by the number of folk who post non-optimal speed test results and then jump and shout like their pants are on fire that they will immediately move to alternative waters if Zen don't fix this within the next 24 hours. Are you people living the in the real world? Is this fault causing you grief? Is it upsetting your usual internet experience? Is it causing playback issues on iPlayer, YouTube? Causing VOIP drop-outs? If you answer yes to all this, then sure - I can see why you would want to leave - and please do so! If you answered no, and you're purely basing your decision on some one-off speed tests, then you really need to lighten up a bit and be more patient. I have noticed slowness but it has not aggravated me enough to be noticeable.

Personally, I have noticed a vast improvement, though I have been connected to bng1 for the past few days. But I'm also not presuming that the first bit of improvement seen indicates this issue has been resolved. As has been more than likely the case, the perceived performance increase over the holiday there was more than likely due to everyone departing the country for a few days.

I await Jon's next update - I'm sure it will be just as informative as his last posts, and hopefully positive news.

Edited by deleted (Wed 30-Mar-16 11:47:06)

In reply to a post by mixt:

With all due respect, that is the way it works... normally. This is purely based on presumptions, which happens a lot in tech-support environments. Why should there be anything wrong if just one person is reporting issues? It's only when numerous customers do, which then suggests the problem is of a larger scope.

I've said before that in a previous life, I used to work in one a major IT vendor's many support teams. This company had a policy of escalating any problem that they weren't sure about or where the customer was even the slightest bit angry, and people like me dealt with them

If a customer came to me with an interesting and not before seen issue - I wouldn't necessarily dismiss it as a one off, tell them that stuff happens, and to go away. Especially when that customer is able to reproduce the issue over and over again.

I wouldn't fob them off with rubbish like "yes, your £100k system crashes when you do this - this is expected", and if I said that I'd be crucified for it. I suspect that if Zen used our equipment and was experiencing issues, they would not appreciate the sort of response that I got.

I'd ask for more data, get logs, try to reproduce it myself, etc - and that's what I did - I could easily and repeatedly show that single threaded performance took a dive from mid-morning to midnight and magically recover overnight.

Indeed, the person I originally spoke to at Zen confirmed that he could reproduce it on a co-worker's connection! So why dismiss what I say as rubbish? Especially don't give me rubbish like "some servers can't send data that fast" (I'm sure that Akamai just can't handle my blistering 70Mbps connection)

What was also quite unhelpful is constantly asking about my router, or telling me that my "usage is quite high", even though I've told them over and over again that the issue persisted when connected directly to the modem, and that I'm the only person using the connection when I do the tests

In reply to a post by mixt:

I admit, it is annoying, that they have possibly been this dismissive to begin with, but Jon Green has been very forthcoming with the information pertaining to this fault. He's even said to everyone concerned on this thread to open a support ticket - this helps them gauge the severity of the fault and possibly where it lies, as they have already disclosed that it appears to be quite an illusive fault, possibly consisting of several different compounding issues, and those are the worst to try and fault find for, especially when a 3rd party is involved like BT etc.

This is great, but the point I'm making is that it took a lot of hassle to get someone at Zen to actually pass it to a person like Jon Green in the first place. As an "award winning ISP" I expected a much easier process to get someone more senior to look at it

In reply to a post by mixt:

Also, I am personally amused by the number of folk who post non-optimal speed test results and then jump and shout like their pants are on fire that they will immediately move to alternative waters if Zen don't fix this within the next 24 hours. Are you people living the in the real world? Is this fault causing you grief? Is it upsetting your usual internet experience? Is it causing playback issues on iPlayer, YouTube? Causing VOIP drop-outs? If you answer yes to all this, then sure - I can see why you would want to leave - and please do so! If you answered no, and you're purely basing your decision on some one-off speed tests, then you really need to lighten up a bit and be more patient. I have noticed slowness but it has not aggravated me enough to be noticeable.

Some of the affected customers are in contracts - so telling them that they should just leave is not workable. What about new customers who may have just joined and noticed the issue? They're stuck for 12 months

In my case, the issue did affect things like iPlayer.

People are quite understandably annoyed that their connections don't work properly, so the high horse attitude may not be appreciated by some

In reply to a post by mixt:

I await Jon's next update - I'm sure it will be just as informative as his last posts, and hopefully positive news.

IMO they haven't always been as informative (and if there's a genuine fear of breaking confidentiality agreements, fair enough) - but the recent candidness is welcome

Edited by deleted (Wed 30-Mar-16 12:38:40)

A week later and its gone down hill again, everything has been great for last 7 days until today.

Packet loss and slow speed.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

And http://speedtest.btwholesale.com gives :-

Download speed achieved during the test was - 50.28 Mbps
For your connection, the acceptable range of speeds is 40 Mbps-52.69 Mbps .
Additional Information:
IP Profile for your line is - 52.69 Mbps

Edited by deleted (Wed 30-Mar-16 21:45:48)

I can understand both points of view.

So e.g. one of my clients sends me an email, one of their clients says their email service is broken (on server i manage). The first two questions i usually ask are.
1 - has anyone else reported it.
2 - have you ran a test to confirm it before reporting to me.
If both are negative I will usually stick it as low priority however I dont ignore it. I will typically at the very least check the logs to see if anything obvious sticks out, and also test using my test account on that server.

One of the problems is that the person making the report can be as vague as "its broken" whilst the person having to diagnose the issue wants detailed information.

With a company like zen these things can be made worse by the fact that you relying on support reps to relay the information accurately to the engineers and if they relay it at all, as they will likely be filtering out stuff they deem as not worthy.

This is one of the reasons a support ticket system is vastly superior to live chat and phone support systems.

Edited by Chrysalis (Thu 31-Mar-16 04:13:01)

These traces illustrate my recent typical downloads during the working day on bng1.

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

http://www.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/results.html...

Godfrey.

Edited by deleted (Thu 31-Mar-16 17:15:29)

In reply to a post by summat:

This makes perfect sense, much appreciated, Jon!

Also much thanks for the update on the single thread stuff. Glad to know its being looked at seriously.

Could you answer why though, that while my general internet use was pretty crippled yesterday, tbb speedtester was registering <5mbit even for the multi-threaded test, and a few other speedtest sites the same.. speedtest.net maintained perfect performance throughout? File downloads were very slow too.

I could literally run a tbb test that comes back at 3mbit, then immediately after start a speedtest.net and get 74mbps.. reliably.

@knight01 was getting the same thing

I've personally had to stop using TBB for providing results to my ISP as the speed tests are reporting such speed decreases that its a false reported slow down.

Constantly getting speeds within 175 to 210Mbps when using alternative services, Speedtest.net, Speed.io, Microsoft UWP Speedtest app, however when using TBB never get over 130Mbps. Been that way for best part of a month. Raised a fault on that basis as I was informed how reliable it was.

Single Thread or Multiple Threads??

What Browser and OS?

What server you test too on 'speedtest.net'??

Virgin don't like ThinkBroadband due to single thread always pointing out congestion issues on there networks, and will not accept results from any 'speedtest.net' server unless its one of their own... and local one too!

I use various different Speedtest.net servers.

Custodian Data Center - Maidstone
Seacom Ltd - London
Cybersmart Pty Ltd - London
Proxar - Sevenoaks

Most servers in Northern England and Northern France and Holland give me 180+Mbps.

Anything apart from Virgin's own hosted servers as that is basically an ethernet test.

Both single and multithreaded. Single will often top out at 90Mbps and multi hits 130Mbps. Using Windows 10 on my desktop, same results with all browsers, Edge, IE and Chrome. I do get slightly better results with the old version of the TBB speed test.

Oh ok, well first, I've found Edge to give uselss results, Internet Explorer seems to do ok though...

Could you try both of these tests and see how you get on,

http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/?site=omega...

http://labs.thinkbroadband.com/speedtest/

Both may appear the same but the first one is a single thread only test.

Ok I'll do it later when I get home from work and PM you the results.