If you read the reviews on ispreview by people that actually have Zen that's when it got really bad. It may have been bad prior to CityFibre assimilation but that was when there became not much difference between Zen and a more mainstream ISP.
Soldato
I accept that Zen may not be what they were but they’re still miles better than BT, EE or Vodafone. I had a truly disastrous installation experience with Kelly Comms until real Openreach engineers got involved and Zen looked after me. So I’m prepared to cut them quite a bit of slack, but I think Aquiss could be good too.
Just because they started to offer CF connections doesn’t explain why the company can email users and notify them of policy changes, announce the sale of its IP ranges on YT and somehow not tell frontline staff till customers contact them.
I don't doubt Zen generally offers a better than average service ala BT/Vodafone/TT etc. but 200K customers is tiny, my current ISP is smaller and adds over 300 activations a day at this stage. The customer base tend to be quite loyal, but have seen price promises reneged on, static IP’s changed so they can be sold off - Richards YT video is cringeworthy - and now charged for, and seemingly seen a reduction in the skill set of technical support along with a network that doesn't seem as impressive as it once did. They aren’t failing as such, but things are certainly not improving or even being sustained. It feels like things are being changed in an effort to save money, and when that becomes obvious, it generally doesn't end well, especially if you are selling your product as a premium offering to a semi-technical user base, those people will look for a better option if they have to change anyway.
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Aquiss Launch 1.2Gbps and 2.5Gbps UK Broadband Plans via CityFibre
Shropshire-based UK ISP Aquiss has followed last week's launch of their first packages based off CityFibre's growing national Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) net
www.ispreview.co.uk
Soldato
Had my Cityfibre connection hooked up today. Only on the 1Gb for now but I'm happy with it 
Fantastic! Sadly not even in planning around here so 900Mb is the best I can do with a paltry upload.Had my Cityfibre connection hooked up today. Only on the 1Gb for now but I'm happy with it
Soldato
I agree.
I'm a critic of Zen, but they still rate higher than most providers.
My main problem with Zen is that they haven't improved their service, instead they have been trying to supply less while charging more money. In other words, they have been trying to compete with the big suppliers.
I joined their group of people who answer polls and surveys for them. You can tell by the questions that their direction has changed from "service" to "increasing profit". They also tend to favour things that bring them monthly income. Rarely do you see "reduce cost" or "low cost" or "saving money" as an option in the survey, but often you see "how much would you be prepared to pay" or "would you pay monthly"!
What Zen have going for them is their support. It's not as good as it used to be, but it is still far better than the likes of BT, Virgin and so on. On that alone, they are in my shortlist of "better suppliers".
I think it's only a matter of time before I leave Zen but only for the likes of Aquiss.
Soldato
So if Freeola can do it any reason why Aquiss can't ?
www.ispreview.co.uk
Freeola Launch 1.2Gbps and 1.8Gbps Openreach UK Broadband Plans
Internet and web hosting provider Freeola has informed ISPreview that they've just become the latest on a small list of UK ISPs to launch consumer home broadba
www.ispreview.co.uk
Soldato
TBH I don't see why people even want 1Gbps. I mean, of course it's nice, but the price hike just doesn't seem worth it. Maybe it is me and the things I do with the internet, but little I do benefits from more than 100Mbps.
When you multiply the monthly by 12 then it all seems expensive to me for a little extra speed that most people don't need. At the moment I am on 300Mbps and when my contract comes up for renewal then I am dropping down to 100Mbps.
When you multiply the monthly by 12 then it all seems expensive to me for a little extra speed that most people don't need. At the moment I am on 300Mbps and when my contract comes up for renewal then I am dropping down to 100Mbps.
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My up to 900Mbps service comes in handy when downloading huge games, had one the other week 129GB even that took 27 minutes. Not that 27 minutes is long.
Soldato
For me it mainly about upload, I'm not saying don't like fast download, if I could get symmetrical 300Mbps I'd happy 
Soldato
For me it mainly about upload, I'm not saying don't like fast download, if I could get symmetrical 300Mbps I'd happy
That's true. If I could find a package that was 50:50, I would be more inclined to pay for it.
Having a decent connection makes lots of things so much easier. Granted you might be turning a 10 minute download into a 3 minute one which in isolation is nothing, but if it's your job and you're doing something where you export 10GB of data and it was formatted wrong, on a good connection it's no big deal and you just do it again until you sort something out, if you 'only' have 50Mbps then each time you need to shift 10GB it's a half hour wait. That gets very frustrating very quickly.
I work from home and prior to having a 500Mbps symmetric fibre I was creating a VM in Azure if I was doing something fiddly in M365 that might require loading in a PST file that a customer had supplied, now I can shove those sorts of things around all day without any issues.
I work from home and prior to having a 500Mbps symmetric fibre I was creating a VM in Azure if I was doing something fiddly in M365 that might require loading in a PST file that a customer had supplied, now I can shove those sorts of things around all day without any issues.
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Soldato
I find 1gb too slow a lot of the time. In this day and age computers do pretty much everything almost instantly. Fast CPUs, fast NVME drives etc. And then wait ages to download something from the internet...? No thank you. Downloading from the internet should be as seamless as transferring something from one drive to another. I'd say 2.5gb starts to be the sweet spot. At that speed you could use cloud storage just as you would a decent modern mechanical HDD. I move stuff back and forth from my NAS at 2.5gbs and it's lovely. Being able to ditch the NAS for cloud, saving space and not housing HDDs? Sign me up
Soldato
I am not arguing that it's nice to have, I just argue it's too expensive. It's a luxury not a necessity. It seems to me (and maybe only to me) that a service that costs around £650 a year, but doesn't really provide anything other than a connection, is kinda expensive. You could almost buy a NAS every year for that, certainly over a few years. On top of that you are going to face all sorts of additional bills for "actual" services, such as Netflix, Cloud, VPN, Email, Landline, or whatever. Because it's monthly, people don't seem to get their brain round how much it's really costing them.
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Soldato
Yes, it's a luxury, but so is having a computer in the first place
I've seen people spend over £100/month on sky TV or Virgin which imo is even worse value
I'm lost as to what the argument being made is, in 2024 "doesn't really provide anything other than a connection" as if connectivity isn't vitally important. You'd give up mains sewage and move to a septic tank before you gave up on having an internet connection.
Yes, lots of things you might use a connection for have additional charges, but that's the same with pretty much everything. What do you use a car for other than driving around using fuel you've paid for to go to places that you're going to spend more money at.
Yes, lots of things you might use a connection for have additional charges, but that's the same with pretty much everything. What do you use a car for other than driving around using fuel you've paid for to go to places that you're going to spend more money at.
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Soldato
Good grief, it's just an opinion. You don't have to agree, or construct elaborate arguments to justify your choice.
The only reason I tried to explain why I think it's a waste of money for the average person, is because I know it's an unpopular opinion.