Zen Internet

Sterlingtimes

I have received multiple ISP letters telling me that full-fibre broadband is ready. I ordered Fibre 900 from Zen on 1 October.

Openreach installed a 50-meter fibre from the pavement to my home on 16 October. The fibre is now one metre from my nose, and yet the best date from Zen for completion of the job is 23 November.

Openreach decided not to screw the grey protection boxes back on the wall because fibre installation was imminent.

Over the weekend, I lost my telephone connection, and my internet speed plummeted. A sort of mud had formed from the water ingress and the mixture of dead insects and worms. I cleaned up with paper kitchen towels.

Now Openreach has to visit on Wednesday to repair the copper system while I wait for fibre.

Why does provisioning take Zen two months? Zen's technical support has been fantastic, but its sale support is wanting. 

brewerdave

The completion of your full fibre is down to Openreach not Zen ; presumably they haven't got any engineer availability - it'll be a different skills set required to run the fibre into your home and install the ONT and router.
As a matter of interest ,in my "village" there has been a bombardment of emails from the likes of Sky/BT/Plusnet etc re full fibre is available - but some of my neighbours who have placed an order, have been told it may not happen this calendar year !!

Sterlingtimes

brewerdave said:

The completion of your full fibre is down to Openreach not Zen ; presumably they haven't got any engineer availability - it'll be a different skills set required to run the fibre into your home and install the ONT and router.
As a matter of interest ,in my "village" there has been a bombardment of emails from the likes of Sky/BT/Plusnet etc re full fibre is available - but some of my neighbours who have placed an order, have been told it may not happen this calendar year !!

Thank you, Dave. It is interesting that your fellow villagers are seeing similar problems. I live in a commuter village where great resource has been given to building the fibre network. Sadly, Openreach cannot currently deliver to its customers. An accountant might say, "let's hold back on digging until we can earn revenue from our customers" or "Why are we spending money on repairing copper when we could deliver fibre services?"

iniltous

The fact that the optical cable has been installed on a different date to the ‘internal installation’ means it’s likely you were a 2 stage install , 2 stage installs ( when ducted feed to the home already exist ) means there was a suspicion that the duct wasn’t serviceable , in situations like this , the actual contractual ‘install’ date is pushed out ( in case the duct was bad ) but as there wasn’t a problem and the optical cable has been installed , there is the option for the second stage date to be brought forward, so  it could be before 23rd Nov, but Zen , once advised the cable is in place that would have to advise you as obviously any new date offered would have to be convenient for you.

There is no reason why your copper service should go down just because the fibre cable was installed alongside, you were either unlucky that the fibre installer ‘damaged’ the copper cable or it’s simply coincidental that the fault occurred around the same time.

Sterlingtimes

iniltous said:

There is no reason why your copper service should go down just because the fibre cable was installed alongside, you were either unlucky that the fibre installer ‘damaged’ the copper cable or it’s simply coincidental that the fault occurred around the same time.

Thank you. That makes real sense. The fifty-metre driveway serves four houses. The house was built in 1996. The fibre men suspected that there might be a blockage in the ducts. In the event, there was some resistance to passing the fibre through the duct, but they successfully completed the task within about 30 minutes. 

Openreach has caused the outage by leaving the grey cable cover unscrewed. It filled with water over the weekend. I have dried it out with a kitchen towel, but now Openreach has to return to fix the issue they have caused through their action. The connections are now unstable, and on Wednesday, they will need to ensure that the connections are good and dry again. 

Sterlingtimes

Openreach came out today and re-terminated the copper. Now I have to wait another month for Openreach to connect the extant fibre.

Sterlingtimes

From Zen "Unfortunately, due to recent and ongoing industrial strikes there is a large back log of work, our suppliers have had to prioritise orders/cases, this means we would have to fix the issue you currently have as we cannot bring your regrade forward."