So, following on from our full fibre (FTTP) broadband installation, we also switched to a new internet provider: Zen Internet.
Zen is one of the oldest Internet Service Providers (ISP) in the UK, having been founded 30 years ago, and in that time it has resisted being bought out by a larger rival. It remains one of the smaller players in the UK ISP market, but has a reputation for offering a better standard of service – it’s been Which magazine’s recommended provider for five years running, for example. A friend of mine who works in IT also uses them at home, and recommended them.
In the past, I’ve considered Zen, but found other companies to be cheaper. However, they now offer fibre-only packages (without a digital voice line) that are only a little more expensive than the mainstream providers, and so we’ve signed up.
Our previous provider was Vodafone. They were cheap, but the service wasn’t the best – a number of small outages here and there, but a big one in October was quite disruptive. Pre-2020, I would have put up with the occasional outage, but now that I work from home 2-3 days per week, and use video conferencing almost every day, I need a reliable home broadband service.
Broadband speeds
So, do Zen internet offer their advertised speeds? In my experience yes – eventually. Part of the reason why I’ve held off writing this for a couple of weeks is to give our internet speed time to settle. When your line is first installed, speeds can fluctuate for the first week or so.
I’ve shared a screenshot of a Ookla Speedtest result above – it shows that we’re getting about 105 Mbps download, and 20 Mbps download. Which is roughly the fastest advertised speeds that we should be getting. We were coping well with 80 Mbps before and so I didn’t see a reason to pay for much faster speeds. Zen apparently offers a 2 Gbps package, which I suppose is great if your household has four teenagers all running separate Twitch streams, but it would be overkill for us.
So far, I’ve been happy with Zen, but as we’ve only had the service a couple of weeks, it’s perhaps too early for a full review. The contract is for 18 months, so I’ll see if I’m still thinking positively with them in late spring 2027.