I for the most part agree with what you saying, even VM now seem to be taking congestion seriously as well.

The problem the small players have is I see like this.

1 - They not as cash rich, so wont have the cashflow to have too much excess capacity in cases where its expensive, meaning they more likely to react to congestion rather than upgrade before it happens.
2 - They dont have the benefit of having a massive customer base, the higher density of customers on a shared platform, the easier it is to contend the product without it been visible. e.g. 1000 customers on a gigabit uplink is preferable to 100 on a 100mbit uplink even tho they the same contention ratio. (also gives economy of scale)
3 - The large isps I think are more likely to attract the grannies etc. who pay for broadband but barely use it. Which again makes it easier to contend without it been visible.

I think revk mentioned AAISP have a high average utilisation per line compared to other isp's which doesnt surprise me one bit, but of course AAISP charge enough and apply a usage limit so they can manage it.

As you said one can gouge the severeness of an issue by checking public forums, the likes of BT and sky have a much bigger customer base than zen, but the level of cases dont reflect an equal level of congestion.

I got no idea what the issue is with zen, but I find it concerning as the issues go away, then come back, a user has reported a planned upgrade on his exchange is going to take several months, but zen did acknowledge the problem and are moving him to alternative backhaul.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sun 21-Jan-18 17:27:29)

Seen users on the BT forums moving from Zen to BT and commenting how surprised they are at the performance boost, it seems plenty of users on Zen struggle with streaming and comment their speedtest.net displayed good speeds - it's the age old single-threaded problem.

I am 100% not against small ISPs, but I have been on these forums from around 2005, and in that time I have seen time and time over the same story, an initially amazingly rated small ISP which everyone shouts and raves home about, over time it begins to display problems e.g. congestion, slower than usual CS response times, and in plenty of cases eventually the ISP sinks. I have seen users with small ISPs be left with no connection literally overnight, and cases of a once amazingly rated small ISP which doesn't respond to customer emails at all, or answer phone calls (I won't mention names, but a few of the old timers on here will absolutely know who).

I have also time and time over seen the personal nature small providers apply, to the extent they take offence and become incredibly rude / unhelpful, once that happens they do nothing to help. It takes one comment from a customer that changes the whole dynamic. There is little escalation at this stage, it's far too personal, whereas with a mass market BT, you can escalate to executive complaints and irrespective they will wipe the slate clean and do everything to get you sorted, assigning a complaints handler who does call back without a personal grudge.

I have done the small ISPs, at one point I had 2 lines and one of them was a smaller provider, to-date everyone in my home has defaulted for the mass-market WiFi commenting "it doesn't buffer" or something similar. Always hard to tell if others in the house are just bias to a bigger more known name, likely the case, but in the end I had 1 TalkTalk line and 1 BT Line, and I must say I had 76Mbps unlimited fibre, for £17.70 including the line rental & my single thread was perfect.

I now just use a sky connection, as the Sky Q is so expensive.

Must state I have experienced congestion on both Sky and Virginmedia, neither held me to contract and with a handful of calls I was able to go on my merry way. I would go back to either ISP, and in-fact am back on Sky.

According to Zen my fault is exchange congestion morning speeds fine after 6 pm really slow

Are you testing wired or wireless? The reason I ask is 2.4Ghz can become super congested at nights, I often get less than 20Mbps over it during evenings, and at 3AM can pull over 70Mbps+ on 2.4Ghz.

Your stats are not the typical congestion, as your X6 result is also bad, you normally see the x6 quite a bit faster, there are some extreme cases of congestion where this occurs - the single and multi thread both being slow and roughly the same speed. If indeed this is the case, I think Zen should fix ASAP or release you from contract.

How long left on your contract?

For fibre your latency is also a bit high, I would expect sub 20ms typically.

Edited by ukhardy07 (Sun 21-Jan-18 22:39:39)

Always use wired only use wireless 5 ghz for phone , latency is always high on TBB tester on speed test net it's always 12 to 14 ms

Anyway Zen is sorting it out , been with Zen a good few years now and always found them better than a few other isp's i have been with !