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Thanks Dan. I took the leap and signed up yesterday. Moving because Zen works out cheaper for me actually.
Hi Housey just read your link.... ouch, the pain.. but glad to see it was worth it in the end as you said "for speed innit?".
Looking foward to my Zen line going live end of this month.
Whats interesting for me right now is that it just so happens I manged to borrow a friends Fritz!box 7530 German version for testing (until Zens Standard issue FB 7530 International Version arrives) with intresting results.
For background, I have been with Vivaciti for 3 years on an 80/20 since we first got FTTC. I'm about 550-575m from my Huwaei FTTC cabinet BDCM (broadcom DSLAM). My RJ11 modem cable is cat5e from a filtered face plate (cable is crimped in)
Now heres where things get interesting for me I have tried quite a few modem routers over the years on FTTC, Draytek (lowest sync speed, errors), Zyxel (meh), Asus 88U (software was rough prone to restarts and stutter), the small Cisco RV134W (nice solid line but very scant GUI that didnt even have an xdsl info tab built in), Billion 8800AXL R2 (meh, prone to slowing down after some time and errors) and most recently an unlocked Tim Hub DGA4132 (speedy but prone to stutter when surfing).
As you can see other than the draytek these are all broadcom xdsl chipset based.
With all these modems the fastest download speeds I had was
Attanable 65-67ish Mbps
Actual 63-67ish other than Draytek which was about 60Mbps
In all cases Upload never exceeded 7-8 Mbps (irresepective)
Now With the FB 7530 my down load speed is 71,01 Mbit/s and upload is 10,770 Mbit/s!!
below is my xDSL info page (in German)
DSLAM-Datenrate Max. kbit/s 80000 20000
DSLAM-Datenrate Min. kbit/s 128 -
Leitungskapazität kbit/s 71057(down) 10773(up) (MAX ATTAINABLE)
Aktuelle Datenrate kbit/s 71019(down) 10770(up) (ACTUAL)
SNR 4 down and 6 up
I find this interesting beacuse my research in trying to get a good modem has always lead back to the rule of thumb that you get best results with a modem with a xdsl chipset matching that of your DSLAM..... the FB 7530 has an Intel VXR 518 xDsl chipset.... and so far its been 24hrs no errors at all and its the fastest most stable modem for me to date. 7 of us all HD streaming surfing and gaming at the same time.
The only issue I continue to have is awful in-game lag and stutter in Arena of Valor (guilty pleasure) on Nintendo Switch, even with prioritized port fowarding (poor latency?).
My post may be a bit of a bore for some and of course line stats will always differ from household to household due to the many variables, however for me at least it seems for now the rule of thumb for modem/DSLAM chipset match for best results seems a thing of the past.
At this stage the FB 7530 is actaully a decent piece of kit.
Will report how I get on with Zen and the Interational Version of this modem and also the lag.
Yeah i agree the router zen gives it a lot better.
C:\Users\Dan>tracert www.bbc.co.uk
Tracing route to www.bbc.net.uk [212.58.249.215]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms fritz.box [192.168.178.1]
2 20 ms 20 ms 20 ms vt1.cor2.lond1.ptn.zen.net.uk [51.148.72.22]
3 20 ms 22 ms 23 ms ae-8.agg1.lond1.ptn.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.14]
4 22 ms 21 ms 19 ms 82.71.254.134
5 * * * Request timed out.
6 19 ms 19 ms 19 ms ae1.er01.lbh.bbc.co.uk [132.185.254.138]
7 32 ms 34 ms 31 ms 132.185.252.126
8 33 ms 103 ms 20 ms bbc-vip153.lbh.bbc.co.uk [212.58.249.215]
Trace complete.
When i connect to uk servers it gives me a flat 20ms like on every hop most of the time.
The lag is very minimal when compared to virgin media, in my own experiance when you get 20ms pings in games that is.
C:\Users\Dan>tracert www.google.co.uk
Tracing route to www.google.co.uk [172.217.23.3]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms <1 ms <1 ms fritz.box [192.168.178.1]
2 20 ms 19 ms 20 ms vt1.cor2.lond1.ptn.zen.net.uk [51.148.72.22]
3 20 ms 20 ms 21 ms ae-8.agg1.lond1.ptn.zen.net.uk [51.148.73.14]
4 20 ms 23 ms 20 ms 72.14.217.190
5 22 ms 22 ms 21 ms 74.125.242.97
6 21 ms 20 ms 20 ms 74.125.253.231
7 20 ms 21 ms 20 ms lhr35s01-in-f3.1e100.net [172.217.23.3]
Trace complete.
Yeah well i get 20ms roughly on every hop it is very snappy and responsive when compared to virgin there is quite a big difference for me in games when connected to a uk server.
With virgin i would get something like 30-40ms ping time.
Before i leave virgin media i am gonna do a ping test comparison hold on folks.
Edit,
Below is my ping times with virgin.
Yeah i have two isps at this point in time but virgin is going to be cancelled asap.
The reasons i went with zen was their reviews on trustpilot as well as awards but more importantly the price is fixed unlike virgin which seem to have increased their prices over time for sure.
The zen network is at the very least more predictable and more consistent with those ping times when compared to virgin but then no isp is perfect but my games have less lag since i have experienced both zen and virgin, i'd pick zen over virgin for gaming.
This here is what virgin are charging us below.
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