FTTP Thoughts?

Housey

Housey

Housey

Man of Honour
Joined
21 Feb 2006
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Surprised to say we have the ability to order FTTP at home. I say this as we are very rural and a small cluster attached to a really small exchange (circa 300 properties on our exchange) but sure enough we have it. I actually walked around the grounds with the Openreach engineer looking at where they were installing our fibre trunks and helping him work out what was what based on the plan he had! :D

Ive been a Zen customer for 10 years but they are around 20 quid a month more than BT for what seems on the surface the same product. I do note however that Zen seems to quote higher upload speeds which for me is worth having. I also know Zen is superb should an issue arise but that is so rare. So I’m guessing both lines will perform exactly the same (uploads aside) but are there any other considerations, contention for example?

Thoughts?
 
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Just ordered the Zen Ultimate Full Fibre 4 package, so 300Mbps down and 50Mbps up, which should be a significant improvement over my current 16Mbps down and around 1Mbps up!
 
That support is worth the money as we suffer from issue with water ingress and noisy phone lines so need the Zen levels of support.
 
So was installed today and it is utterly borked and I am VERY annoyed at the amount of time I have wasted today. I am currently getting around 2.6mbps on what should be a 300mbps line. I am told that something is wrong (like I hadn't worked this out) and it seems that the provisioning has been done wrong by someone, I have to say I fear Zen. I am been told to wait for overnight changes but right now I am angry as **** at the whole process because it has got in the way of a massively busy day for me and left me with a service twice as expensive and 8 times slower.

Will give it till the morning, but the dogs of war are in their kennels and will be sent in in due course if I do not get my 300mbps. Line sync tests showed I should get 330mbps too, I have a fast line but right now something is messing my internet up. :(
 
Been through all that. 4 machines, 2 routers, direct connect to modem etc the issue is network side Zen have confirmed sol
 
Engineer in morning, couldn't do today as I was in meetings all day.

Broken systems in network somewhere so need BT/Zen to fix.
 
I still think it is config. The BT Openreach engineer did some very thorough testing and I made him wait 2 hours as I worked to get it working with Zen and all the tests their end showed I had a strong like that should deliver easily the max 300/50 (they said 330/55 was expected) I pay for. It seems Zen have not provisioned it correctly, they should have done it as a new install not an upgrade in their words. I have no idea what this means or the impact of doing this, but my username and password would not work and I was told after testing there was a problem at my local exchange which would need a visit. This was Tuesday and then Tuesday evening I got a call saying it's all OK now, try again. It worked, but the performance was rubbish. I was told give it 24 hours, I did and first speedtest around 6am Wednesday was bang on the money at 300 down, 54 up. Next one was 120 down....then 96....then 220 then 46. I was out all day yesterday so only spoke to Zen whilst heading home around 7:30 and the engineer visit was agreed as we had exhausted all avenues my end.

Direct link to MacBook from BT Fibre modem removed my router as the issue, problem still there. Used 3 machines, 1 x PC and 2 x MacBooks (all via cable then wifi) and that helped remove the machine as the issue. I have been in this game long enough to know when the problem is not my end. Engineer will be here 8am so hopefully he can get to the bottom of it but I suspect its some crappy kit in the exchange..

5 mins ago
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It seems to me that I am getting a share of a connection, not my own 300mbps connection. This is what happens every night this week, it just goes to this sort of speed, so about 1/3 of my old ADSL+ speed.

I'm sure they will fix it, never had any issues with contention on Zen and they have also come back this evening and said they will sort our reimbursement when it's fixed, which is another example of good service.
 
300/50 is mine and 300/50 is want I’m told to expect, every hour of every day of every year. So that is the expectancy and that is what I am paying for. If I don’t get that I won’t be paying for it for long.
 
He has been and gone. Evidenced the issue was on Zen's side so now booted it back to them. We removed my kit and the Zen kit, connected directly to the OpenReach network and BOOM, 291/51 consistently. He will write his report and I will pick it up with Zen later today when I have time. Annoying as I have felt all along the issue was a Zen issue, you do this stuff long enough you tend to get a feel for it and seems we have now 100% proved this. I am not sure what Zen will now do, but they need to do something.

Jez said:
To be fair to Housey i would not expect to notice contention this noticeably, on a 300mbit line with an ISP the size of Zen.
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Indeed.

We are talking about 46mbps and even 2-3mbps at night. My ADSL+ was 17mb 24/7/365 on one of the smallest exchanges in the UK with less than 400 properties on it! The testing has shown that using my kit, but connecting to Openreach I get the speeds I would expect to see, using the BT testing tools which often under read performance, not over read.
 
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I am not on FTTC, I have moved to FTTP and when I was on FTTC the influx had no impact on my speeds which were 17mbs all the time, anytime.

I was told clearly that I should expect little if no slow down from 300mbps and 50mbps and right now I am averaging low 100's daytime and low single figures in the evening. It is their problem and they will I am sure fix it and make good for my time and costs as they have already offered to do.

These things happen, annoying but not something I get angry over......well not yet anyway.
 
Dangerous Dave said:
With the performance on offer I expect they wouldn't offer much of a fight to end the contract without penalty.
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I have just made it clear they have a week. If it is not sorted by then, I am gone. I also came close to losing my temper after the last call when I was asked for the 3rd time to carry how the same tests I have carried out to 'just make sure we have checked everything' and then told by the tech exec "well I didn't know this" thinking that would appease my anger, when of course the fact he had not read the logs one of which I updated with said notes 2 hours back made me even angrier.

Zen are now going into their network but feisty techs are not what they need to put in front of me right now....
 
I have just updated the support log with my notes and made it quite clear I will be 'disappointed' if they call me again and ask me the same questions I have answered previously and now added in my own time to their support logs. I have given them to the end of next week (I am out the UK on business half of next week) to resolve this. I will be disappointed if I need to wait that long, gone if I have to wait longer.
 
Ive been given a new login and password this afternoon so will try this later. Newly created on new process so fingers crossed.
 
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