And why do you need to ring Zen so much, that warrants the extra cost in service? Tbh I find most consumer ISPs (except Talktalk) to be adequate.
It should be very rare that you need your ISP for support. I always go with price if performance is no different.
Sure... until you do need them. I've had to work with Zen support exactly three times:
1) When I moved from BT to Zen. Flawless. Can't say the same for any of my house moves while I was with BT. BT support is horrendous, takes forever, is very convoluted, you can end up on the phone for an hour for something trivial, they've no idea what they're doing, they're just pushing keys on some internal support system. They're not empowered, they can't give any useful information, and at the base level, they just don't care, they have no motivation to own a support issue. Every single move I did while I was with them had multiple stuff-ups, where I usually ended up without Internet at the new address for many weeks as a result of their incompetence. Given that (until recently) OpenReach was a division of BT, it's all the more shocking that an external company like Zen can provide so much of a better experience given it is something they do not control. And have you seen a BT bill? It is *on purpose* made so complicated that it's very difficult to work out what you owe and how you pay for things (e.g. they give you the option of pre-paying for a year's worth of line rental -- why? And good luck with figuring out how that factors into your bill, and when it expires).
2) Something happened on my physical line, and the speed dropped significantly. In the end three OpenReach engineers had to come out to sort it out. Ended up with about 10% faster download (and slightly slower upload) than I had before, so I was happy in the end (and no loss of service, just a fair bit slower for a week or so). Again, working with Zen was flawless, they chased twice daily, gave me twice daily updates, called me at least twice over the course of the week or so that it took to resolve to give me very verbose updates about what was going on. Absolutely stunning level of service.
3) When I signed up for the above-mentioned promotion. Got through in under a minute, very friendly, all done in less than five minutes.
Given the price difference is quite small, plenty of premium technical features, and amazing technical support staff, I honestly don't know how or why anyone would choose any other ISP.