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by TheOtherHobbes 2067 days ago
Zen were terrible when we used them at home. Having used Zen in the past I was expecting better. They eventually provided a service, but it took longer than it should have and there were a lot of unnecessary mistakes and support calls along the way.

We were literally trying to get them to work through a set up procedure they had somehow forgotten to do - on Christmas Eve, which was at least a week later than it should have been.

A&A have a good rep among geeks but they seemed expensive and I've never used them.

The best service I had in the UK was with Virgin (on local coax). Apparently their customer service is pretty poor. But aside from the occasional random outage the service mostly just worked, and at the advertised speeds.
3 comments
PaulKeeble 2067 days ago
Zen used to be good, back in the early 2000s they had amazing support. But they like most of the other ISPs have been racing to the bottom and they are a shadow of their former self. Unlike Sky and Plus.net and such its not an acquisition issue it just seems to be the quality of what they do has dropped substantially over the years. They remain one of the better ones but that is only because the service is that bad at Sky/Plus.net/EE/BT that it is a low bar to pass.
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kawsper 2067 days ago
Agreed about Zen, we experience random dropouts at night sometimes for hours, I don't know if they are doing unannounced infrastructure changes or what it is.
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defanor 2067 days ago
I've observed it from the other side (failing to connect to a Zen customer for more than an hour), and additionally the zen.co.uk website refused to serve me either directly or via Tor when I tried to check its status and/or a looking glass service (though not recalling finding those anyway, when I've finally connected via a private server).
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arprocter 2067 days ago
Although I haven't had the 'pleasure' of dealing with any of this in a good while, my experiences mirror your last paragraph.

It seems like a lot of the problems in the UK are down to the state of the POTS copper - if you're in an area that got NYNEX'd back in the day then cable is the way to go

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