no connection for a week, options?

After something like 12 hours of Zen technical support desk and 3 Openreach visits, I thought I'd ask here for advice as I'm at the end of the road.

Full fibre Service installed early January. No internet connection. 2 hours of Zen helpdesk calls and no luck. 36 hours later it suddenly started working.

Late January, I needed to move the router, so unplugged and replugged the LAN cable to ONT. No internet. 2 hours of Zen helpdesk calls and no luck. BT engineer booked for the next day. It started working 2 hours before he arrived. So I unplugged and replugged it to see if it was OK and ... no internet. BT guy couldn't do anything. New ONT as well. All good from his side. Another 2 hours on Zen calls and no luck. Started working itself 18 hours later. Unplugged it from the Fritzbox to move to my own router and it stopped working. Came back on its own hours later.

Working fine Feb/March, 500-700Mbps.

Skip forward to April. House power switched off (construction site next door) and back on. Lost internet. It has not come back in 5 days. BT guy says nothing wrong but changed ONT. Zen sends another loan router, still doesn't work. BT 'strip and rebuild account' several times. BT 2nd/3rd line support says everything good. Zen can see Radius requests coming through but no connection. Sometimes the fritz event log shows a connection for less than half a second. Have tried other routers. We've done many factory resets, triple checked all ONT/Router/password etc settings.

The most technical of the support people essentially think there is some tiny window for authentication and it's not grabbing it, but once in every 1000'seconds of attempts it manages to authenticate and hangs on until next unpliugged.

I think I'm at the stage of moving to another provider, though if it is an openreach problem that may also carry over. I saw mention I cold ask Zen for a 'cease and reprovide'?

Next door neighbour has Openreach (through EE) and it works fine, same termination telegraph pole.

Do I have any other options? I'm not kidding that its been 12 hours on Zen calls and 3 OpenReach visits of an hour each, too.

Edited by zengarden (Mon 07-Apr-25 14:52:31)

I would suggest you give yourself a deadline by when this needs to be sorted by Zen (its been ongoing for far to long) and if it isn't you then need to tell Zen you want to be released from your contract so you can go and sign up with a different ISP. You may be concerned the issue could continue with the new ISP but at this point you don't have anything to lose and at least at that point you will have learnt that it isn't Zen equipment causing the issue.

If Zen can see the authentication requests throughout and your ONT lights aren't showing any error state then this is a Zen fault that they have to resolve.

When the connection comes up do you have normal throughput?

> When the connection comes up do you have normal throughput?

Yes, I've been getting 100+/600+ up/down when it is actually connected. That's why I am skeptical when they claim some OR routing config.

If they can't resolve it tomorrow I'll ask for a cease & reprovide, which they've been reluctant to do, or just terminate and move to another CP. AT least that will tell me if it is/was OR or Zen.

If a neighbour has no issues on EE and are connected to the same telegraph pole , optically their connection and yours are identical, it’s at the handoff to the ISP/backhaul that your connections diverge, so that pretty much absolves the OR kit , the ONT potentially could have been the issue but as you have had that changed a few times that’s pretty much eliminated it as the cause of your issues ….your strategy seems reasonable, ask to be re provided to clear out any potential dodgy data or ask to be released penalty free and join another provider

I think you’ve been more than patient. In your position I’d move to another ISP.

Inclined to agree with the others and I think jpm's diagnosis is good.

have you tried a pppoe direct connection to the ont and with a different known working ethernet cable?

In reply to a post by jpm:

If Zen can see the authentication requests throughout and your ONT lights aren't showing any error state then this is a Zen fault that they have to resolve.

When the connection comes up do you have normal throughput?

Not necessarily. Authentication is forwarded by BTE to the ISP's specified RADIUS servers, actual flow of data between ISP and customer hasn't started yet. If Zen are accepting the credentials and seeing nothing further the PPP session hasn't gotten past the BT Enterprise BRAS.

Edit: I'm going by mention of BT 2nd and 3rd line alongside mention of strip and rebuild that this isn't a Zen GEA service.

Edited by XGS_Is_On (Sun 20-Apr-25 03:54:51)

The problem was resolved after 58 days (!!!) of no broadband. The root cause was a faulty port status in the Openreach Exchange. The port was rebooted (or maybe changed?) and service has been perfect since. Not sure how it took that long for openreach to escalate and diagnose unless it was finger pointing to the provider (zen).

Zen customer service was good throughout. Engineer update calls every 2-3 days, and a MiFi in the meantime.

Edited by zengarden (Thu 05-Jun-25 06:35:07)