Good home fibre broadband provider?

Agh … I hope this won’t affect you too much then.

I can’t say a bad word about BT, faultless & has never failed since I had the old multi extension, phone fax & telex house wiring removed some 8 years ago. Even better with the SmartHub-2 & it’s extender.
However, this means I never had need to test their levels of incompetence.
The last time I needed to call was about my contract renewal, this ended up with an unexpected £6 reduction & more free stuff on our phone cards.

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My experiences with BT (2 major events spread across 8 years) is that the service delivery once up & running is fine, it’s getting things done and adhering to contracted terms where they fall short. And I’ve spent so much time on the 'phone with, it must be said, helpful staff that I wonder how they make a profit if my experience is replicated across much of their customer base. It’s almost as if the marketing, sales, technical and account management teams all have different hymn sheets, a classic case being around how you manage a legacy BT e-mail address, which is attached to a legacy BT account set-up.

As a pure provider (vis the title of this thread), I think BT are good but, as above, some elements are shambolic IME, some of that recent (Q1-22).

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Zen = :blush::+1:

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Zen FTTP for a couple of years - no real problems, good customer service if needed.

But - the have removed their ‘no price increase’ guarantee for new/upgrading customers which means I’m unprotected if I boost my speed. That was a competitive advantage they have now lost so I’m less keen to recommend.

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Thanks Richard - that’s useful to know.

Why would a provider add that power unless they plan to use it?

Which? say:
"Rules set by the regulator Ofcom mean that customers can leave mobile, landline or broadband contracts penalty-free if a provider ups prices mid-term if it’s bigger than the RPI rate.

You can cancel your contract and switch to any other provider, as long as you do so within 30 days of being told about the price increase.

But, if your broadband provider has warned you about rises in their terms and conditions and they are in line with RPI, you won’t be able to leave if you’re still locked into a contract. If you do want to leave, you’ll have to pay an exit fee."

Out of interest, how much does broadband (and fibre) cost for what speed in UK? And what do you use it for that you need fibre rather than ADSL2+?

Where I live, being a small island, choice is limited, with only two providers (the infrastructure owned by one, rather like the BT model). Prices seem expensive to me (compared to ADSL2+ at £36 pm), and I don’t see the point, though my two sons, who spend much of their leisure time gaming online, would prefer fibre!

Fibre costs here from the infrastructure owning provider:
£58 pm = “average 29 mbps”
£64 pm = “average 99 mbps”
£73 pm = “average 180 mbps”
£100 pm = “average 393 mbps”

And from the other:
£48 pm = “up to 100 mbps”
£58 pm = “up to 200 mbps”
£83 pm = “up to 500 mbps”
£154 pm = “up to 1000 mbps”

27 quid here for 50MB through BT.

I think the point is that with fibre you shouldn’t get those “average” and “up to” descriptions.

In general if it’s not fibre then you are sharing something with other nearby customers and what you get depends what demand they are making at any particular time. If it’s fibre, they may cap it to match what you are paying for, but it should be reliably that fast.

“Average” is not useful if it’s 10 Mbps when you use it and 100 Mbps while you are asleep. Equally 1 Mbps is within “up to 100 Mbps” but not something that would excite you.

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Averages (assuming genuine) seem more meaningful to me than “up to”. But interestingly one of my two possible providers quotes averages, and the other one “up to”, for fibre broadband!

Indeed, I noticed.

France I am paying for a fibre plus mobile phone package together at 55.00 pounds sterling equivalent.
Fibre guaranteed at 1Gbps up to 2Gbps.

(Mobile phone not supplied but sim and coverage is for 20Gb download limit. Free calls within France plus a couple of nominated numbers outside France.)

Have been with Zen for almost 20 years, they cost a bit more but support has always been UK based and assuming you know a bit more than the average consumer who probably doesn’t care much about such things they always work really hard to address any issues - for example allowing me to set up routines to monitor network latency/speed when I had issues a few years ago, help with scripts/config settings to hook up an old modem/router of theirs to act as modem only for a Ubiquiti router, they’ve always been excellent in terms of customer support.

Not sure if it’s legacy/still available to new customers but their customer portal was/is excellent, crumbs I can see Information back to 2010 or earlier!

(They’ve changed their metrics from showing Mbps to Kbps rather than me getting a >1000 speed boost! :rofl:)

I’m able to manage reverse DNS settings and so many other things I doubt most other providers allow.

I still have a fixed IP address range with them ever since I signed up - good at the time but not so sure now due to the amount of tracking/profiling online if you care about that kind of thing but there are other VPN/VPN like solutions to cover that.

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As others have said Zen are currently reliant on Openreach services for the most part, but I’d suggest after recommending them to a colleague in a remote location who had issues with BT that Zen tech support are very tenacious in getting BT Openreach to sort things out and investigate.

Also it’s brilliant when you talk to their tech support not to feel as though they’re reading from a script once they’ve established a few basics.

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Moved house a month ago, moved from Virgin Media - often slow on busy Friday evening, appalling access to poor customer service, to Zen. Advice on set up, best package and easy to call. One month in and no issues. Very happy.

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Is that through copper?

I am currently paying BT £36 per month for 100-150mb/s through fibre.

They gave a free boost to 500mb/s for the first month, but all that extra bandwidth made no appreciable difference to anything - in fact my family of 5 was always previously fine with about 30mb/s with PlusNet through copper.

BT broadband say:
“You’ll always speak to one of our team based in the UK and Ireland.”

Why did you choose to pay nearly 50% more for fibre?
I’m just curious as to reasons to change and benefits of fibre - clearly if activities need higher bandwidth than ADSL2+, but (other than business server usage) I’m under the impression that only very intensive online gaming, or possibly multiple people in the household streaming films, would need or benefit from it, though of course downloading, say, a hi res album could become near instant.

I just saw the current equivalent of the package that you’re on:

Full Fibre 1 gives a headline of 50Mb - but has a ‘Stay Fast Guarantee’ of 25Mb.

Do you know whether you normally get closer to 50 or 25?

Yes, it’s FTTC.

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