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You might want to consider switching from Zen to AAISP[1]. Zen used to be decent, now pretty much only the only residential ISP left that offers quality suppor

You might want to consider switching from Zen to AAISP[1]. Zen used to be decent, now pretty much only the only residential ISP left that offers quality support is AAISP. They also have all sorts of stats monitoring[2] on all customer lines by default, which they expose to customers on the portal. AAISP will also, unlike many ISPs, not shy away from giving Openscreech a strong poke with a very sharp stick if the underlying issue with your line is due to Openreach. They know how to play the BT game. No affiliation with AAISP other than knowing a number of their customers, not a customer myself due to completely unrelated reasons which are entirely beyond their control. They are not the cheapest ISP in town, but it very much is a case of you get what you pay for. [1]https://www.aa.net.uk/ https://www.aa.net.uk/ [2]https://support.aa.net.uk/Category:Diagnostic_Tools https://support.aa.net.uk/Category:Diagnostic_Tools

arcza 3y ago
I already have an AAISP line coming on Monday! Very excited. AAISP = the new Zen.
- flir 3y ago
  The biggest difference you'll find is that when you phone support you'll probably be having a conversation with someone who knows more about networks and routing than you do. Doing first line support. I figure the only way this is economic is because they have a technical customer base who phone support maybe twice a decade. Years back I had a conversation with someone who had done a couple of ISP mergers, and his opinion was that techie-focused ISPs look fantastic on paper because their support costs are really low. Then someone buys them, tries to expand their userbase to "regular" people, and their support costs fall in line with the rest of the industry (eg Demon -> Thus -> Vodafone). So far, A&A have avoided that fate.
  - daveoc64 3y ago
    So many people rave about the support A&A provides, but I don't really understand why support is so important to people. Isn't a stable connection more important?
    - pbowyer 3y ago
      It is, but in many parts of the UK BT's equipment is knackered. So you rely on support to poke BT with a big stick to get things fixed quickly.
    - flir 3y ago
      Not much they can do to improve that, as they're relying on Openreach same as everybody else. But when you phone them up because your copper pair dies every time it gets soggy and they say "Yeah, I can see it in the logs. That's a bit crap. Nothing I can do from this end but I'll get on to Openreach and email you in about ten minutes with an appointment" instead of "Ok, I'm going to talk you through rebooting your BT Hub", it leaves a positive impression. Oh, and on the subject of stability, they send me an SMS every time my line goes up/down. Even if it happens at 4AM. They don't have to, other ISPs hope you won't notice, it's just a nice feature.
    - indymike 3y ago
      > Isn't a stable connection more important? Support is for the times where the connection isn't stable, and it appears AAISP handles these situations better.
    - traceroute66 3y ago
      > I don't really understand why support is so important to people. Support is not important, until you need it. There are alt-net providers out there (who shall remain nameless) whose engineers are trained to practically breathe down the necks of their customer just after installation in order to get them to post a 5-star review on Trustpilot. However the reality is when the customer has an issue down the line, they discover to their horror that the post-sales support is shit.
move-on-by 3y ago
As someone living in rural America- it is amazing there are so many providers! I literally have a single broadband provider available to me.
- maccard 3y ago
  The line is usually owned by either Openreach, Virgin, CityFibre, or a smaller local provider. The "ISP" is a reseller that gives you a modem, router, etc. it's not really that competitive in reality
  - darreninthenet 3y ago
    I'm not sure I agree, the ISP rents the bandwidth off the "main" provider on equal terms so the competition stems from the quality of the support and service that comes with that... there's a reason why AA have such an outstanding reputation and also why they aren't the cheapest.
  - xbmcuser 3y ago
    That is how it should be infrastructure is government funded people compete to provide services on it. Just like most roads/highways are. Asking 4-5 different isp to do the infrastructure independently would increase costs by 4-5 times then they would be competing for customers so payback period for infrastructure investment is up in the air. This is the main reason USA has problems with monopolistic isp as who the fuck invest in infrastructure when another isp is already there. So they all build in there own areas and cost of infrastructure become the most that keeps other out.
  - jjbinx007 3y ago
    We had fibre laid a couple of years back but for some reason I can choose City Fibre based ISPs OR Virginmedia on the same line. I don't think I've ever seen that before, they usually don't share their infrastructure like this. I can't get Openreach-based FTTC ISPs though.
- traceroute66 3y ago
  > As someone living in rural America- it is amazing there are so many providers! Sort of. Certainly when it comes to home internet connections, there is a little bit of smoke and mirrors because BT have their horrid sticky fingers in many pies. So the reality for many home internet connections in the UK its more a case of finding an ISP who's on your side and that is willing to pick a fight with BT when needed. This also remains the fact with the alt-net home fibre providers, because they will typically just aggregate your building onto a BT connection back to their PoP. Well, that's slightly unfair, because ISPs clearly also vary on their own commercial decisions such as how "hot" they run their network, whether or not you can get static IPs and whether or not they run CGNAT. And there are some very noticeable quality differences on this level. The absolute independent choice is only there for businesses in (some parts of) major cities where you have genuinely independent operators running their own fibre end-to-end, never touching the BT network.
stuaxo 3y ago
Huh, I was with Zen + they got openreach to fix a crap cable + connectivity went up from 20mbit to 70 on my last ADSL connection.
aidos 3y ago
As a smug AAISP customer that was my reaction on reading the title. They’re one of the few honest isps. If they lose connection to your house they notify you immediately and then again once the connection is back up telling you how long it was out for. Have also seen the openreach situation play out. I tried to get one of the other providers initially and they said that it would take almost a month for openreach to do the install. Contacted AA and they had it done in a couple of days. They actually show the logs of their comms with openreach in your online account so you can follow along.
enlyth 3y ago
Sadly A&A don't offer an unlimited bandwidth plan, which in 2023 seems absolutely ridiculous if you ask me.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago
  >> Starts with ADSL and 1TB/month download for £25.00 Wow.
- mnd999 3y ago
  How much do you need? 10tb/month which is their higher quota is a lot.
  - enlyth 3y ago
    More than 1TB a month. Just downloading one game from Steam can easily be more than 100GB these days. Downloading ML weights churns through gigabytes easily, as does downloading or streaming 4K movies. What's the point of having gigabit download speed if you have to constantly worry about using up your cap? And paying an extra £5 for every 250GB extra seems like some arbitrary punishment for power users. They don't pay for infrastructure based on bytes transferred so why should I as a customer pay this random made up number?
    - ta1243 3y ago
      They say: > The second reason, which mainly makes sense with our terabyte services, is to have a high limit but one that deters the really heavy users, i.e. the people that literally use hundreds of times the typical usage. By excluding such customers from these services we can provide a faster and better services to our customers
    - mnd999 3y ago
      That’s still not going to use 10tb. Maybe 2 or 3.
- GordonS 3y ago
  This is what made them a no-go for me - they may well have superb service, but their service would be expensive even without a bandwidth cap. And 1TBbof bandwidth in this day and age is nothing.
Crosseye_Jack 3y ago
> They know how to play the BT game. Ever since the introduction of the "Automatic Compensation Scheme" the larger ISPs (zen being one of them, the scheme covers about 80% of UK customers) have had a bigger stick to whack Openreach with as Openreach have to contribute to the payments to end customers. (Some altnets such as CityFibre have also started signing up to the scheme, but iirc CityFibre don't pay per day for faults, only missed appointments and delays to connecting a new line) One thing ISPs can do (but increases their costs) is increase the service level on your line, standard service is iirc end of 2 full business days, which most residential lines are on. Next level is end of the next working day, next level is end of same day (if reported before 1PM and next day if not) including Sundays/Bank holidays. And the next is 6Hr fix around the clock. But the higher the service level the more the ISP has to pay OR for the line. I can see "more specialised" ISPs such as A&A increasing the service level of the lines but passing that cost on the customer (one of the reasons of their increased cost, but as you said you get what you pay for, though this is just speculation as I have no idea if they actually do, just seems like something they would do - A&A are known not to be fobbed off by Openreach). However the "Automatic Compensation Scheme" and increased service levels still doesn't stop Openreach taking their time. Recently had an FTTP outage which took a week to clear, Blinking PON, first tech who turned up determined there wasn't an issue between the pole and the premises but as he was "first level support tech" there wasn't much else he could do, he did however call someone at the exchange to poke around which a few things (which he told me was "above that persons pay-grade", so he shouldn't really be doing it but it was worth a shot as its fixed issues in the past) but no dice and the call would have to be escalated (They said it was a one-way light issue). Next call was a missed appointment, Booked the callout, waited in until an hour after the time, called the number I got on the text and it was the same person as the callout before, OR had screwed up and put it back on his job list instead of escalating it, not the end of the world, just wish they had told me so I didn't waste most of the day waiting for someone who wasn't going to turn up. 3rd call out and this tech re-splices every splice between my house and the exchange, tech told me it was four splices (not including the splice in the "customer service point"). Still no dice. At which point they believe its a problem with a fibre card in the exchange, it will need resetting which they don't want to do in the middle of the day because it will knock everyone connected to it offline while it resets. Fair enough, he tells me they will get it done overnight, next morning still flashing PON, call the number for the 3rd tech and they confirm that the card wasn't reset and they will get it done that night. Next day, Still Blinking PON, I'm just about to call the tech again (this is about 8am) but as I'm pulling out my phone PON goes static green, I start rebooting and reconfiguring kit (I was using my own 4G back up, I hadn't config'ed auto failback, so was killing one connection and restarting the other) when my phone rings, its the 3rd tech to tell me that they hadn't reset the card overnight again so he did it himself, something he wasn't supposed to do but heck it was getting silly at this point as it had been a week and from his end it was looking like my ONT had connected and was calling to make sure I was connected (which I was). So even Openreach have to take the advice of the The IT Crowd every once and a while, because it turns out my week long outage was cleared by turning it off and on again.
ksec 3y ago
>Zen used to be decent, I remember they were often referred as one of the best on ADSLguide.uk. At least in the late or early 00s. It is sad to see the state of UK ISP not improved much after 20 years.

arcza 3y ago

I already have an AAISP line coming on Monday! Very excited. AAISP = the new Zen.

flir 3y ago
The biggest difference you'll find is that when you phone support you'll probably be having a conversation with someone who knows more about networks and routing than you do. Doing first line support. I figure the only way this is economic is because they have a technical customer base who phone support maybe twice a decade. Years back I had a conversation with someone who had done a couple of ISP mergers, and his opinion was that techie-focused ISPs look fantastic on paper because their support costs are really low. Then someone buys them, tries to expand their userbase to "regular" people, and their support costs fall in line with the rest of the industry (eg Demon -> Thus -> Vodafone). So far, A&A have avoided that fate.
- daveoc64 3y ago
  So many people rave about the support A&A provides, but I don't really understand why support is so important to people. Isn't a stable connection more important?
  - pbowyer 3y ago
    It is, but in many parts of the UK BT's equipment is knackered. So you rely on support to poke BT with a big stick to get things fixed quickly.
  - flir 3y ago
    Not much they can do to improve that, as they're relying on Openreach same as everybody else. But when you phone them up because your copper pair dies every time it gets soggy and they say "Yeah, I can see it in the logs. That's a bit crap. Nothing I can do from this end but I'll get on to Openreach and email you in about ten minutes with an appointment" instead of "Ok, I'm going to talk you through rebooting your BT Hub", it leaves a positive impression. Oh, and on the subject of stability, they send me an SMS every time my line goes up/down. Even if it happens at 4AM. They don't have to, other ISPs hope you won't notice, it's just a nice feature.
  - indymike 3y ago
    > Isn't a stable connection more important? Support is for the times where the connection isn't stable, and it appears AAISP handles these situations better.
  - traceroute66 3y ago
    > I don't really understand why support is so important to people. Support is not important, until you need it. There are alt-net providers out there (who shall remain nameless) whose engineers are trained to practically breathe down the necks of their customer just after installation in order to get them to post a 5-star review on Trustpilot. However the reality is when the customer has an issue down the line, they discover to their horror that the post-sales support is shit.

move-on-by 3y ago

As someone living in rural America- it is amazing there are so many providers! I literally have a single broadband provider available to me.

maccard 3y ago
The line is usually owned by either Openreach, Virgin, CityFibre, or a smaller local provider. The "ISP" is a reseller that gives you a modem, router, etc. it's not really that competitive in reality
- darreninthenet 3y ago
  I'm not sure I agree, the ISP rents the bandwidth off the "main" provider on equal terms so the competition stems from the quality of the support and service that comes with that... there's a reason why AA have such an outstanding reputation and also why they aren't the cheapest.
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  That is how it should be infrastructure is government funded people compete to provide services on it. Just like most roads/highways are. Asking 4-5 different isp to do the infrastructure independently would increase costs by 4-5 times then they would be competing for customers so payback period for infrastructure investment is up in the air. This is the main reason USA has problems with monopolistic isp as who the fuck invest in infrastructure when another isp is already there. So they all build in there own areas and cost of infrastructure become the most that keeps other out.
- jjbinx007 3y ago
  We had fibre laid a couple of years back but for some reason I can choose City Fibre based ISPs OR Virginmedia on the same line. I don't think I've ever seen that before, they usually don't share their infrastructure like this. I can't get Openreach-based FTTC ISPs though.
traceroute66 3y ago
> As someone living in rural America- it is amazing there are so many providers! Sort of. Certainly when it comes to home internet connections, there is a little bit of smoke and mirrors because BT have their horrid sticky fingers in many pies. So the reality for many home internet connections in the UK its more a case of finding an ISP who's on your side and that is willing to pick a fight with BT when needed. This also remains the fact with the alt-net home fibre providers, because they will typically just aggregate your building onto a BT connection back to their PoP. Well, that's slightly unfair, because ISPs clearly also vary on their own commercial decisions such as how "hot" they run their network, whether or not you can get static IPs and whether or not they run CGNAT. And there are some very noticeable quality differences on this level. The absolute independent choice is only there for businesses in (some parts of) major cities where you have genuinely independent operators running their own fibre end-to-end, never touching the BT network.

stuaxo 3y ago

Huh, I was with Zen + they got openreach to fix a crap cable + connectivity went up from 20mbit to 70 on my last ADSL connection.

aidos 3y ago

As a smug AAISP customer that was my reaction on reading the title. They’re one of the few honest isps. If they lose connection to your house they notify you immediately and then again once the connection is back up telling you how long it was out for. Have also seen the openreach situation play out. I tried to get one of the other providers initially and they said that it would take almost a month for openreach to do the install. Contacted AA and they had it done in a couple of days. They actually show the logs of their comms with openreach in your online account so you can follow along.

enlyth 3y ago

Sadly A&A don't offer an unlimited bandwidth plan, which in 2023 seems absolutely ridiculous if you ask me.

justsomehnguy 3y ago
>> Starts with ADSL and 1TB/month download for £25.00 Wow.
mnd999 3y ago
How much do you need? 10tb/month which is their higher quota is a lot.
- enlyth 3y ago
  More than 1TB a month. Just downloading one game from Steam can easily be more than 100GB these days. Downloading ML weights churns through gigabytes easily, as does downloading or streaming 4K movies. What's the point of having gigabit download speed if you have to constantly worry about using up your cap? And paying an extra £5 for every 250GB extra seems like some arbitrary punishment for power users. They don't pay for infrastructure based on bytes transferred so why should I as a customer pay this random made up number?
  - ta1243 3y ago
    They say: > The second reason, which mainly makes sense with our terabyte services, is to have a high limit but one that deters the really heavy users, i.e. the people that literally use hundreds of times the typical usage. By excluding such customers from these services we can provide a faster and better services to our customers
  - mnd999 3y ago
    That’s still not going to use 10tb. Maybe 2 or 3.
GordonS 3y ago
This is what made them a no-go for me - they may well have superb service, but their service would be expensive even without a bandwidth cap. And 1TBbof bandwidth in this day and age is nothing.

Crosseye_Jack 3y ago

> They know how to play the BT game. Ever since the introduction of the "Automatic Compensation Scheme" the larger ISPs (zen being one of them, the scheme covers about 80% of UK customers) have had a bigger stick to whack Openreach with as Openreach have to contribute to the payments to end customers. (Some altnets such as CityFibre have also started signing up to the scheme, but iirc CityFibre don't pay per day for faults, only missed appointments and delays to connecting a new line) One thing ISPs can do (but increases their costs) is increase the service level on your line, standard service is iirc end of 2 full business days, which most residential lines are on. Next level is end of the next working day, next level is end of same day (if reported before 1PM and next day if not) including Sundays/Bank holidays. And the next is 6Hr fix around the clock. But the higher the service level the more the ISP has to pay OR for the line. I can see "more specialised" ISPs such as A&A increasing the service level of the lines but passing that cost on the customer (one of the reasons of their increased cost, but as you said you get what you pay for, though this is just speculation as I have no idea if they actually do, just seems like something they would do - A&A are known not to be fobbed off by Openreach). However the "Automatic Compensation Scheme" and increased service levels still doesn't stop Openreach taking their time. Recently had an FTTP outage which took a week to clear, Blinking PON, first tech who turned up determined there wasn't an issue between the pole and the premises but as he was "first level support tech" there wasn't much else he could do, he did however call someone at the exchange to poke around which a few things (which he told me was "above that persons pay-grade", so he shouldn't really be doing it but it was worth a shot as its fixed issues in the past) but no dice and the call would have to be escalated (They said it was a one-way light issue). Next call was a missed appointment, Booked the callout, waited in until an hour after the time, called the number I got on the text and it was the same person as the callout before, OR had screwed up and put it back on his job list instead of escalating it, not the end of the world, just wish they had told me so I didn't waste most of the day waiting for someone who wasn't going to turn up. 3rd call out and this tech re-splices every splice between my house and the exchange, tech told me it was four splices (not including the splice in the "customer service point"). Still no dice. At which point they believe its a problem with a fibre card in the exchange, it will need resetting which they don't want to do in the middle of the day because it will knock everyone connected to it offline while it resets. Fair enough, he tells me they will get it done overnight, next morning still flashing PON, call the number for the 3rd tech and they confirm that the card wasn't reset and they will get it done that night. Next day, Still Blinking PON, I'm just about to call the tech again (this is about 8am) but as I'm pulling out my phone PON goes static green, I start rebooting and reconfiguring kit (I was using my own 4G back up, I hadn't config'ed auto failback, so was killing one connection and restarting the other) when my phone rings, its the 3rd tech to tell me that they hadn't reset the card overnight again so he did it himself, something he wasn't supposed to do but heck it was getting silly at this point as it had been a week and from his end it was looking like my ONT had connected and was calling to make sure I was connected (which I was). So even Openreach have to take the advice of the The IT Crowd every once and a while, because it turns out my week long outage was cleared by turning it off and on again.

ksec 3y ago

>Zen used to be decent, I remember they were often referred as one of the best on ADSLguide.uk. At least in the late or early 00s. It is sad to see the state of UK ISP not improved much after 20 years.