Caporegime
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Do a Thinkbroadband speed test and see what the multithread performance is like. I'm increasingly hearing that Zen are congested on their peering links.
 
Man of Honour
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41417988671_64a5535d3a_b.jpg


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.
 
Caporegime
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They will probably shift you to a different backhaul provider. Test it again when you get up in the morning first thing and chances are the lines will be closer to each other as well as being closer to the speed you're meant to get. It's not an Openreach fault by the looks of it.
 
Associate
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afaik the best BT package is 300/20

It's 300/30, I'm on it.

My first contract was 50% off, pure luck that a deal was on when ordering... I'm now on a 40% discount for 18 months.

The service has been faultless for me.

I'll be interested to see what the sky price is like when they start.
 
Man of Honour
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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.
 
Man of Honour
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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.

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.
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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Soldato
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10 Oct 2006
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Users have been reporting peak time contention issues with Zen for a few months now, they dropped FTTC prices before Christmas and had an influx of customers which no doubt hasn't helped.

I would be tempted to jump ship from Zen and move to BT for a year they have such a large network it is rarely affected by contention.
 
Man of Honour
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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.
 
Man of Honour
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With the performance on offer I expect they wouldn't offer much of a fight to end the contract without penalty.

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....
 
Man of Honour
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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.
 
Soldato
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Sounds like you need a new radius login as yours is obviously incorrect. Can they supply you with some temporary ppp details to use?

This would certainly rule the issue in or out.
 
Man of Honour
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Ive been given a new login and password this afternoon so will try this later. Newly created on new process so fingers crossed.
 
Caporegime
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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.

Zen aren't that big though, which is part of their appeal. Flip side of that is that they don't have the raw capacity that some of the lesser-rated ISPs like BT, TalkTalk etc. do.

If they promised you a throughput figure 24x7 then they lied to you - it's a contended broadband service and they aren't in a position to make those sorts of guarantees. I do agree you should see more than 1/3rd of the provisioned performance.
 
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