Zen Internet
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Zen not living up to expectation
Went to Zen for FTTP on a recommendation, price was more than current ISP for FTTP but liked the idea of supporting an independent and it seemed Zen were small enough to care and provide good service if needed. Well, things haven't been good, the connection drops out periodically, it can be lots of disconnect and reconnects in succession or a few here and there, all terminate the internet connection so really not suitable for connection dependent tasks. The phone support people are nice to speak to and pay good lip service but there is no substance to anything they do. I've had internet connections continuously since he early 90's and have worked in IT since '97, if in my line of work if there was a connectivity issue like this I'd be expected to fix it. Zen tell you that in no uncertain terms there is no SLA or guarantee of 100% uptime. I understand this but where a customer is experiencing this type of intermittent outage on a frequent basis surely it's not acceptable and should be investigated, but no, the response is typically "it's up now, seems stable, see how you go", then it drops out again at some point. It's been 2 months, it's not stable so have decided to move back to my former ISP (FTTC) who were more adept at fault resolution. To cancel, the retentions team require the technical team to authorise the cancellation without any termination fees. The technical team have acknowledged that the service has been down over 20 times, but that's not bad enough to justify a waiver of the termination fee. I was on the phone with them earlier and again was advised that there was no active fault, it was fine and there was zero packet loss and if an Openreach engineer was sent out I would be charged £180 as it would be likely they would find no fault as the issue is, wait for it... "intermittent" but there is actually 100% packet loss when the issue occurs. This troubleshooting methodology seems quite flawed since it's obvious there is an issue, it's intermittent and so what the technical team should surely be doing is things like checking past logs of the various devices from when the time the issue occurred which may include the infrastructure Zen manage and could also include Openreach infrastructure. Checking the line every time I call when there is no issue seems nonsensical. In fact, Zen engineers have advised that when I experience the issue, other Zen users at the Exchange also experience drops. At this point in time, Zen want just over £800 to cancel the service which is absolutely extraordinary and quite obscene given the circumstances, I really struggle to see how this can be justified. So beware, if you have a non-problematic experience with Zen then it seems you'll be fine but if you experience any issues like I have then you'll struggle. I always feel a company's performance shouldn't be just based on what it does well, but also how well it deals with problems and I'm sorry Zen falls short in this department. It's actually quite disappointing and a kick in the teeth, placing trust in and making the effort to switch over to Zen only for them to not live up to expectation and be charged over £800 to leave because of their deficiencies.