Fibre Broadband- Vodafone, Zen or Talktalk?

Street now on full Fibre (CityFibre) so we are as well binning our £90 a month 10 years old BT plan which is only 50mbps. For half that price or less can go Fibre. Have a choice of 3 providers, no huge difference in price and not fussed about choosing cheapest for sake of a few £.

So who best or who to avoid in terms of install and support? Vodafone appear to offer Wi-Fi extenders and 4g backup as part of service, worth it? An old stone house which current BT hub can’t reach all parts of, so is a consideration. Talk talk I recall had bad rep for customer service but that’s years back. Zen I have no knowledge of but seem to have which rating.

PS got about 3-4m of front garden from pavement to house, do they dig and bury cable to connect to house if that short a run?

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£90 a month? 😲 Fibre should be a lot less than half that. I’ve got a 1000mb for £30 (yes I know, but I just wanted to see what it was like and it was only £3 more than the 300mb one).

Which area are you in? I’m in York with CityFibre and have a big choice. We went with No One internet. Service has been good, customer service has been very good. Gave me a hand in setting up my own router, gave me all the info I needed to get it all up including IPv6.

Indeed tho £90 is BT line plus calls plus broadband. But yeah can save a lot by binning BT and a phone line rarely if ever used. 

Anytime calls plus, caller ID etc and 70mb FTTC should be under £50.. Anyway you don’t have to pay that now! I’ve heard good things about Zen but not used them. Cityfibre are ace though.

Used Zen at my old place, would definitely recommend them.

They did cost more than other providers but were excellent. I switched from Plusnet to them and though the headline speeds were the same it was far more responsive and reliable, which is odd as it was the same FTTC line. Their standard router is very good as well.

In fact I’m using their router at my new place even though they’re not my ISP. Zen will add a mesh device or two but it costs a few quid extra per month. I found it cheaper to buy one off eBay (Fritz7530).

Customer service is also excellent. Would be with them now but cannot get them as an ISP where I live now.

I picked up Zen (also on a CityFibre connection) when I moved into this house after some strong recommendations on here. Can’t be bothered to recount the details but they were absolutely miles ahead of PlusNet when it came to getting things going. Only ting to be aware of is the connection is so fast it might melt your face off.

FTTC or FTTP?

Vodafone appear to offer Wi-Fi extenders and 4g backup as part of service, worth it? An old stone house which current BT hub can’t reach all parts of, so is a consideration.

I have the same issue and it’s a pain in the arse, but I wouldn’t be paying a premium subscription to an ISP to fix it.

4G backup, perhaps if you work from home in a critical service. Though I might argue “why do I need this backup, is your service so unreliable?” It’s a bit “extended warranty at Curry’s.”

Had Zen in the last house and they were very good with FTTP. Unfortunately now back on FTTC  which although it should be fine for normal streaming and gaming once a few are online it’s inadequate compared to 900Mbs.

FTTC isn’t with zen though!

Vodafone have a bit of a reputation for poor service. TalkTalk will work fine if you’re using their router but will wash their hands of you if you use your own kit. Zen are happy for you to use your own stuff and have been known to give some guidance if you’re stuck.

Fttp or fttc – how would I know? Whole street dug up and ‘hatches’ on street outside every house. I assume fibre to that point. 

what the connection to house is, the distinction? 

FTTC will show no change from what you all ready have fitted. FTTP will have a rectangular brown plastic box fixed to your wall where the fibre goes into the house and meets the ONT box inside. The box is a receptacle for spare fibre that is coiled within. if it comes to the house on overhead poles there will be a yellow tag on the pole warning of fibre overhead.

CityFibre don’t offer FTTC as far as I’m aware.

I have vodafone, it was a bit of a PITA getting it set up but to be honest not sure I can blame Voda, my FTTP install was an early one in my area and they seemed to have messed up the paperwork for it from day 1. Got there in the end and Im not sure anyone would have been different. They did refund me a months fees for the couple of weeks we were messing about (and I still had BT to use at the same time).

The router is total garbage as to be expected.

So who best or who to avoid in terms of install and support? Vodafone appear to offer Wi-Fi extenders and 4g backup as part of service, worth it? An old stone house which current BT hub can’t reach all parts of, so is a consideration. Talk talk I recall had bad rep for customer service but that’s years back. Zen I have no knowledge of but seem to have which rating.

Im on the standard voda router in my comment above; its garbage. I didn’t see paying for Vodas premium service when I expected the routers to be gash anyway. I have a Google mesh to do the wifi. Not the fastest but super reliable mesh routing. Integrates with other google home etc. You can buy a refurb triple pack from ebay for £80. Plug one into the router and dot your other two round the house. You won’t get more than probably 100mbs on the mesh, but its a solid 100, which is more than enough for any device I have ever needed. There’s loads of mesh wifi now so probably can find better cheaper. I have 5 point setup that services our house (Big and very thick walled old place) and our annex in a single mesh.

CityFibre are horrendous where I live. They made such a bodge of putting the cables in the road (literally an inch below the tarmac, unprotected fibre, so they’ve been cut a few times since by other work) I wouldn’t even consider letting them run a cable from the street to my house.

My parents decided to go with them, got all hooked up at the house, blowing a few bricks in the process, and then it turned out they hadn’t fitted the cabinet at the end of the street…

Openreach on the other hand did a lovely job.

we moved to Zen after various troubles with our previous ISP (can’t quite remember who – possibly Plusnet?) and they’ve been great since. Every few weeks the street whatsapp group lights up with the usual, “Anyone on Virgin?  Is your internet down?” etc etc.  Very happy to have opted out of that for an extra few quid a month!

We’ve got Vodafone FTTP (overhead wire to box and through wall into the house, as described above). When connected it’s good, fast. But every few months it has periods where the internet drops out. Spent an age trying to get a resolution about 6 months ago, eventually hard reset router and it seemed to be better for a month or so and now back to dropping internet. The 4g backup has never kicked in afaik and when we asked about it when we were on multiple calls got no good answer. So as said, customer support is a bit crap. We’re moving house soon so we’ll change supplier. We also have Virgin FTTP and it also had some issues but I don’t recall it being as bad.

Every few weeks the street whatsapp group lights up with the usual, “Anyone on Virgin?  Is your internet down?” etc etc.

Exactely the same here, I don’t understand why people in our area persist with Virgin – they seem to think it’s the norm to have outages. Over the last 3 years of working from home, I’ve  had two outages, both of less than 10 minutes (that’s FTTC and then more recently FTTP from Openreach via Plusnet).

Been happy with Zen, decent UK support and while the only things I’ve needed have been openreach-related (initial install then a digger taking out the whole street’s fibre) they were good about liasing and keeping me informed.

Cable run is usually the same way your copper line gets to your house. You can apparently get the cable entry to wherever you like but you’ll have cable clipped to the outside of your house by someone who doesn’t care too much about how it looks. I went for the most discreet place at the front, then ran my own cat5 from the ONT to my router under the stairs.

I think you’re best off sorting out your own wifi than something that might tie you to a provider. In a stone house (or any that blocks signal nicely) ideally run some cat5 and have multiple access points from Unifi or similar. Mesh might work but you’re still fighting to get signal through walls even if it is shorter runs between access points. The trouble is that faster wifi on higher frequencies doesn’t pass through materials as well – and if you connect to 2.4ghz for better range you won’t get near the speed you’re paying for on fibre.

We have Vodafone FTTP and after the initial faff of getting it in, it’s been solid. 

Agree with others that Vodafones customer service is rubbish and theyl left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Messed up the dates of installation a couple of times and didn’t tell me, failed to communicate with Open reach, messed up my first few bills.  Raising a formal complaint helped but not much.

Open reach had to dig the pavement up as the conduit was buggered and then found there wasn’t conduit from the road to our house so had to do a dig. Open Reach guys where good and consulted on best route for least distribution, which was down the drive. They patched afterwards and it looks good. Another Open Reach engineer then came to do the house bit. 

I’ve had CityFibre via Vodafone since earlier this year. Vodafone was the only available reseller at the time. It’s been very solid albeit with my own router from the start. The fibre line is strung to the fascia alongside the copper twisted pair from the telephone pole across the street and the installation was reasonably quick and tidy.

We had City Fibre do the street. With 3 of us WFH we grabbed it with both hands.

Went with Vodaphone super-dooper package “unbreakable” wifi. It was *very* breakable. The router plus extenders was awful awful crap crap crap. The dongle never worked. My experience certainly wasn’t helped by the fact that Vodafone didn’t have me as a customer so all their automated customer help was inaccessible to me.

In a fit of pique, I cancelled the DD and signed up with Talk Talk who City Fibre said used their network. They didn’t. A couple of weeks later I had a second fibre (Openreach) fed into the house. I went with Talk Talk as they do 2 x EERO mesh routers with the package (I bought a 3rd router off Ebay knowing I’d need it). It’s been completely solid – not a single glitch or outage . Brilliant.

3 months after I’d ‘left’ vodaphone, they decided I was, actually, a customer and started to chase for payment. they can do one. 

Currently on Vodafone, it works, router seems OK.

But if it’s a choice between Zen and Voda/TalkTalk, Zen every time.

We’ve just had a new pole installed opposite our house by Viberoptix. 

We binned off the landline years ago, 2mb at best. Currently using 4g for our broadband. I believe seeing as the new FTTP is being rolled out with Viberoptix we’ll be tired to Fibrus if we wanted FTTP. Or can other companies use the same infrastructure?

Talk Talk I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. They still owe me £50 from 20 years ago…

Or Plusnet. Bargain prices but never quite managed to get me a reliable service.

BT were ok once theyd replaced their shonky Router, but Vodaphone were, for half a dozen years, Totally reliable and reasonably priced. But they couldn’t find my new address –  central Brighton- so we said goodbye.

I replaced them with Zen, who have been OK, other than the signal disconnecting randomly. Probably something to do with the very flimsy router. For their premium price they really should do better!

Thanks all, ordered placed with Zen 

To complete the post, ordered 3 days ago, garden dug up and Fibre to the house today, zen router arrived too and now sitting here with 500mbps. So far so good. Mrs P dealt with the install but seems to have been fine. Team of 4 turned up and done in an hour. Trough in garden I think only 6” deep so maybe not ideal but it’s not in a place should be an issue.

no improvement in range over BT so back of house doesn’t pickup Wi-Fi. Just need figure out if I can do anything clever with the old BT router and LAN cable to extend or maybe not if that’s mixing Fibre router and broadband router. Or look into extenders. Probably cheaper a DIY solution than a £9 per month ‘every room’ add on from Zen.

Just get another Fritz 7530 router, you can set it up as a mesh node in parallel with your exiting router. I found they were cheaper than the official Fritz mesh nodes on ebay. I paid £35 plus £4.79 p&p for mine back in July.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2322090.m570.l1313&_nkw=fritz+7530&_sacat=0

 seeing as the new FTTP is being rolled out with Viberoptix we’ll be tired to Fibrus if we wanted FTTP. Or can other companies use the same infrastructure

Technically Fibrus are compelled to offer wholesale access. In reality their wholesale price is higher than their retail, so strangely they have yet to have a single wholesale contract in place!

I’m assuming you’re either in NI or Cumbria @breadcrumb ?

Ah, yes I’m in Cumbria. Explains why they’ve installed their own telegraph posts rather than use the existing Openreach ones.

I would of thought they would be some kind of fair competition clause in place.