zens gateway complaint response

Many will be aware of the ongoing zen gateway(TM) issues where you'll get randomly placed on either London or Manchester gateway. I'm not sure what's changed recently, but for me this appears to have become far more unreliable over the last few weeks, with me quite often ending up on the Manchester gateway, despite me living in the south. The end result being my latency more than doubles.

I originally contacted customer services, asked to be placed back on to London and to raise a complaint to make it stop happening. Support ultimately closed the ticket saying nothing they could do.

I then left a poor review on trustpilot which triggered a complaint manager to be assigned and a real complaint to be opened. My point to them was that their gaming page here is misleading, as they are not always providing the best connection possible. They've now come back to me after 7 days with the following:

I did raise this issue to one of our Technical Support experts for further advice, as it is not myself who would deal with the technical aspect. He has advised that the gateway shouldn’t usually cause an issue with gaming, and if it is, this can suggest there is another issue. He has checked the ping time and advised these are not as good as they could be, so he has checked the exchange and the gateway for this. He has advised the gateway that is used at your exchange is not always the best at router the best and most efficient path, and that there is a roll out in the next 4 weeks where customers on these gateways will be placed onto a different gateway, and this should improve the routing.

So it seems they have admitted there is a problem, but it seems strange to me that this could be specific to my exchange. I am on openreach and am on zens backhaul instead of BTw. I'm hoping if this is at the exchange level that they also roll out whatever they need to at all the other exchanges, so others can benefit.

It's also a shame that it has come to this to get them to even look at the problem.

Edited by zebb_edi (Wed 31-Jul-24 14:27:12)

This Zen gateway (north/south) issue on both on Plexus and BTw has been ongoing for many years and Zen have always been unwilling to accept and do anything about it. To be honest I am not sure I trust the response but only time will tell.

Just to add the same, this has been an ongoing problem for years, and don't trust it will be fixed. It is clearly by design, presumably they don't want to add more capacity direct to London so weave people around all the over the place to use capacity they have spare elsewhere.

I had the same issues at Idnet years ago who used Zen Wholesale. You could drop PPP and a few tries got you back to the London route, only for them to drop connections to force them back, presumably because over days and weeks everyone was doing the same and they had to get people back on the other routes.

Not sure the exchange comes into it, sounds like a load of flannel. It doesn't make sense for someone south of Manchester to ever get routed up to Manchester just to get routed back down again to London data centers, as this adds unnecessary distance which increases latency. Someone north of Manchester is no worse off really, but everyone else sees an increase in latency.

Given their own advertising which forms part of your decision to buy their product which they are not delivering on, just leave them, if they come after you for money as you are still in contract, take them to a small claims court, they will soon back down due to their false advertising.

If you are out of contract vote with your wallet, but just make sure whoever you move to doesn't use Zen backhaul, as you will have exactly the same issue.

Edited by E300 (Wed 31-Jul-24 17:25:23)

One of the reasons I left Zen was when querying with their support they never seemed really willing or able to pass the issues to the back-end or give you sensible answers. At that point I couldn't justify a premium price for no premium service or support and moved to AAISP.

AAISP do have blips and problems but they do answer things clearly most of the time.

In reply to a post by PCJM40:

This Zen gateway (north/south) issue on both on Plexus and BTw has been ongoing for many years and Zen have always been unwilling to accept and do anything about it. To be honest I am not sure I trust the response but only time will tell.

In my personal experience as a Zen subscriber, i only have experienced this latency issue described several years ago when i was migrated from BTW to Zen's GEA plexus but i also suffered a very low single thread throughput issue So the migration was reverted to btw, a years later i was migrated to a 3rd party backhaul (tt wholesale) where the connection was tunnelled to London 1st hop after my network, latency same 12-13ms when MCR on btw was 6-7ms, but latency to moist destinations was the same , more recently i got migrated to ZEN'S GEA I assume , but this time it terminates in mcr , but i can GW hop to London gateways too Should latency rise on mcr gw's

In reply to a post by E300:

Given their own advertising which forms part of your decision to buy their product which they are not delivering on, just leave them, if they come after you for money as you are still in contract, take them to a small claims court, they will soon back down due to their false advertising.

If you do decide to leave, then don't avoid paying the final bill. Take them to court if you want to attempt to claim it back, but don't simply not pay the bill. You'll get a strike against your own credit file, and possibly debt collectors on your back, and this is way more hassle than it's worth.

But I'd strongly recommend you simply wait out until the end of the contract. You did, after all, sign a contract to accept the service they provided for a particular period. And advertising or no, the contract you signed didn't guarantee to route you via London instead of Manchester, or to meet a particular SLA for ping round trip time. Advertising does not form part of the contract, nor is there a "money back if not satisfied" guarantee.

In any case, do you have any evidence that your gaming is suffering? Most gaming servers insert delays to equalise ping times between players, so that people living close to the servers don't get an unfair advantage.

Small claims you could use the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations. This covers promises included in advertising, such as 'Promoting a product you don't want to sell' and in this case it might be considered a bate and switch tactic with Zen advertising a gaming product with the lowest latency, but failing to supply that product, alternatively there is 'Over promise, under deliver' consumer protections.

Using false, or deceiving advertising to sell a product is classed as an unfair trade.

This isn't legal advice of course, but consumer law in the UK is fairly good towards the consumer. We all know Zen wouldn't let it get to a small claims court.

The advice about withholding payment is of course true, you should pay and then claim it back by whichever method you would like to try. The first course of action should be to raise an official complaint with Zen and try their dispute resolution.

For an easy life it might just be better to move somewhere else, and get your own back by leaving reviews about your experience.

Edited by E300 (Thu 01-Aug-24 10:08:43)