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[bogof]

6 weeks is all it took  :'(

Unbelievable.  What a bunch of clowns.  Chin up, you got two more weeks than I did!
I got assured they'd really, really mark my account not to get moved again if I gave them a 2nd chance, but once bitten...
I went to AAISP, has been exemplary.  I'm a bit over 1TB a month, so I move to 10TB every 3 months, which keeps the cost down a bit.  A bit annoying they don't do a more flexible billing system and I keep having to do that, but I'll live to save £90 a year...  I don't think it would help you though, at 5TB/mo.
I don't think I'd consider objectively worse ISPs just to get rid of PPPoE - PPPoE is a solvable problem, a crap connection isn't.  My Ubiquiti HW isn't brilliant at PPPoE, so I made a little OpenWRT box as an edge router just doing PPPoE.  AAISP give you 8 IPV4 IPs if you ask for them, so I don't have to do double-NAT with such a setup (I just route one of the IPs through directly).

I understand Sky and TT to both have capacity issues in some areas meaning no 1000 services, my experience of providers not being able to resolve issues when their kit is in BT exchanges (Zen) says to me that if your line is a BT line you really are likely better off with a BTW based service, as it is bound to be the case, for right or wrong, that BT are more able to get issues resolved within their own group than 3rd parties are.  NowTV in our exchange (Sky) seems to have had some pretty rough patches (looking at my parent's connection details).

So my advice would be find a BTW based supplier that ticks your boxes.

[Jasonkruys]

Unbelievable.  What a bunch of clowns.  Chin up, you got two more weeks than I did!
I got assured they'd really, really mark my account not to get moved again if I gave them a 2nd chance, but once bitten...
I went to AAISP, has been exemplary.  I'm a bit over 1TB a month, so I move to 10TB every 3 months, which keeps the cost down a bit.  A bit annoying they don't do a more flexible billing system and I keep having to do that, but I'll live to save £90 a year...  I don't think it would help you though, at 5TB/mo.
I don't think I'd consider objectively worse ISPs just to get rid of PPPoE - PPPoE is a solvable problem, a crap connection isn't.  My Ubiquiti HW isn't brilliant at PPPoE, so I made a little OpenWRT box as an edge router just doing PPPoE.  AAISP give you 8 IPV4 IPs if you ask for them, so I don't have to do double-NAT with such a setup (I just route one of the IPs through directly).

I understand Sky and TT to both have capacity issues in some areas meaning no 1000 services, my experience of providers not being able to resolve issues when their kit is in BT exchanges (Zen) says to me that if your line is a BT line you really are likely better off with a BTW based service, as it is bound to be the case, for right or wrong, that BT are more able to get issues resolved within their own group than 3rd parties are.  NowTV in our exchange (Sky) seems to have had some pretty rough patches (looking at my parent's connection details).

So my advice would be find a BTW based supplier that ticks your boxes.

Thanks, that's a useful insight.

I got a call today from the core support/complaints team asking if they could spend 24 hours looking into why I was migrated again - so expecting the same chatter tomorrow that they super-promise with extra cherries on top it won't happen again. Given how the first 2 months of torture played out, and the repeated assurances they gave after I cited the multiple cases of a re-migration when I was deciding what to do, I'm not sure they really know what they're talking about. I'm sure if they give that chatter tomorrow they will actually believe it, even if they have absolutely no means of making it a reality.

Interested in learning a bit more about your setup if you don't mind? I run an OPNSense router doing all of my firewalling, routing, IDS, NGINX Proxy, and VPN duties, so having an 'unfiltered' Public IP address on the WAN of the appliance is necessary. I'd previously looked into using my previous OpenWRT loaded Asus R7800 in front of the OPNSense appliance, but concluded it was not possible. It seems I needed to run a 'half-bridge' to transparently pass the WAN IP to the OPNSense WAN, which OpenWRT cannot do on PPPoE (only PPPoA), as it terminates the PPPoE tunnel and thus gets the WAN IP. Are you saying that with AAISP and a block of 4/8 addresses I'll be able to terminate the PPPoE tunnel on the OpenWRT device and pass through one of those public IPS to the OPNsense appliance thus basically making the Asus device 'invisible'?

(Presumably the same is possible for IPv6)

Thanks

[bogof]

I don't know about IPV6, but this is what I do on my OpenWRT box for IPV4.  AAISP give you a single IPV4; plus yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy is the /29 block they gave me when I asked for it.   The router gets the single public IP from AAISP that they originally assign when the PPPoE connection is set up.  AAISP also route the /29 block over my connection.  The below setup gives me a LAN connection on eth0 that I don't use but have for emergency use (which if you use, ends up routing places via the single public IP from AAISP).  The router that is behind the OpenWRT box has a static IP in the yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy/29 range, and is connected to the PUBLIC interface.  Any traffic that originates in that network looks to the world to have come from that static address, and not the single IP, and traceroutes out show the yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy address as a "hop" on the way out. 

Yes, as far as I can tell it is fully unfiltered and just looks like any other static IP, I have a site to site VPN set up in the Ubiquiti stuff which depends on it.

This is running on a Lenovo SFF PC with a quad gigabit card.

Code: [Select]

config interface 'loopback'
option device 'lo'
option proto 'static'
option ipaddr '127.0.0.1'
option netmask '255.0.0.0'

config globals 'globals'
option ula_prefix 'xxxxx:xxxxx:xxxxx::/48'
option packet_steering '1'

config device
option name 'br-lan'
option type 'bridge'
list ports 'eth0'

config interface 'lan'
option device 'br-lan'
option proto 'static'
option ipaddr '192.168.1.1'
option netmask '255.255.255.0'
option ip6assign '60'

config interface 'wan'
option device 'eth1'
option proto 'pppoe'
option password 'xxxxxxxxxx'
option ipv6 '0'
option username 'xxxxx@a.1'

config interface 'public'
option proto 'static'
option device 'eth2'
list ipaddr 'yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy/29'

[Alex Atkin UK]

That's interesting, as I can't for the life of me remember how Plusnet did it back in the day.  I seem to recall though it wasn't like this, you didn't get the bonus PPP address as that would have been useful.

Maybe I'm mis-remembering it though, was a long long time ago.

Are you saying that with AAISP and a block of 4/8 addresses I'll be able to terminate the PPPoE tunnel on the OpenWRT device and pass through one of those public IPS to the OPNsense appliance thus basically making the Asus device 'invisible'?

(Presumably the same is possible for IPv6)
Thanks

Well yeah, that's how a router works.  NAT is a fudge to share one public IP address across multiple clients, once you have a public IP range then you're in the realm of normal subnet routing so can route those IPs onwards as you would with any router on the open Internet.

[bogof]

I think there is some kind of half-bridge way that you can set it up with some fake addresses that works with a single IP address (the eth port on the PPPoE handling router needs a fake address) , but I couldn't work it out, and it seemed that given AAISP had the option of the extra 8 IP addresses routed over the connection, that this was a really neat and clean way to do it.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Yes I remember the HG612 supported that, there's instructions on here somewhere about it as I think someone got it working.

Of course the flaw with the AAISP way is its taking away precious IPv4 space.

[bogof]

Yes I remember the HG612 supported that, there's instructions on here somewhere about it as I think someone got it working.

Of course the flaw with the AAISP way is its taking away precious IPv4 space.

I'm sure they have plenty...

[spudgun]

I hope you don't mind me asking, but how has this developed over the last week?

[Jasonkruys]

I hope you don't mind me asking, but how has this developed over the last week?

Well...

Apparently Zen are very keen to resolve. Someone from the tech complaint team phoned me to offer huge apologies. Noted I'd already made the decision to leave, but asked if I would give them a day to find out what has happened. The ridiculousness of the original case probably helped. I decided I had nothing to lose, and I was interested how they could so monumentally screw it up repeatedly.

Long story short, they believe the issue is with Openreach or at least they need their help/engagement to fix it. Happening on very few lines which makes it difficult. No suggestion they would subject me to continued horror trying to resolve the GEA issue, but keen to get me back on wholesale and actually stop a future migration. There was a flag on my account, but if the flag is not noticed and the line not manually excluded from scope each time a migration script is run, then it will be migrated. However, they have confirmed with the NOC that there is a backend manual change that can be made on the actual system/line itself so even if the script is run, the line will report back 'nope, I'm not doing that until the year 2033' (or insert date here). Sounds like this is not something that is routinely done.

I'm still clear to leave if it all goes wrong, and they'll credit any term fees if I do, but given I have spoken to the exact same actual human several.times not reading from a script, who I think is genuinely horrified, and who has kept me up to speed honestly, and openly throughout, I have decided to chance it. He is going to touch base on the day of migration (next Friday - stuck with OR standard 10 day turnaround) check all is good, then ensure the backend change is made and confirm back.

Every now and then I think I'm mad, then I think that the GEA issue is the only problem I have with Zen. In selecting an alternative there has been a large compromise for all - cost if I want to be able to talk to someone that has half a clue what they're doing (AA), A naff call centre, or no static IP, or no IPv6 if I want to limit cost to similar to what I am paying. Annoyingly, GEA aside, Zen does seem to be the sweet spot for me.

I'll report back in 4-6 weeks   

[spudgun]

Thank you for your detailed update it is greatly appreciated.

I won't even pretend to understand the technicalities of it all, but it does sound as if you have got to speak to someone at Zen who is being consistent with their information to you.

One thing I would have a concern over with what Zen are proposing is if you ever want to switch away from Zen in the future, would that type of transfer also get a 'nope I'm not doing that' style response and cause issues? - Of course, it might not work like that and I may just be showing my ignorance.

On another note, one of the ISPs i mentioned on the previous page, unchained, are now offering a 1gb line for £1 a month more than Zen and are guaranteeing a BT Wholesale backhaul and I think they have all of the features that you are looking for - so you might want to keep that information in your 'back pocket' in case it all goes pear shaped with Zen again.

I bet the 10 days to another remigration are really dragging, but I hope that you will have this all sorted soon and your case will act as a beacon of hope to other Zen users and Zen have finally realised that this doesn't work for some users.

[Jasonkruys]

Thank you for your detailed update it is greatly appreciated.

I won't even pretend to understand the technicalities of it all, but it does sound as if you have got to speak to someone at Zen who is being consistent with their information to you.

One thing I would have a concern over with what Zen are proposing is if you ever want to switch away from Zen in the future, would that type of transfer also get a 'nope I'm not doing that' style response and cause issues? - Of course, it might not work like that and I may just be showing my ignorance.

On another note, one of the ISPs i mentioned on the previous page, unchained, are now offering a 1gb line for £1 a month more than Zen and are guaranteeing a BT Wholesale backhaul and I think they have all of the features that you are looking for - so you might want to keep that information in your 'back pocket' in case it all goes pear shaped with Zen again.

I bet the 10 days to another remigration are really dragging, but I hope that you will have this all sorted soon and your case will act as a beacon of hope to other Zen users and Zen have finally realised that this doesn't work for some users.

Interesting, where have you seen that with Unchained? I've just spent 5 mins on their website and not been able to get near that option. Seems difficult enough to even get to ordering the 330 package. Have to be honest, given I've genuinely spent 5 mins and not found what I want or anything close, it doesn't bode well for service going forward!

[spudgun]

After you click on 330/50, there are a range of 'configurable options' which are the range of speeds you can order - 1000/115 is £56 inc vat a month

They have only added that option in the last few weeks - they are probably my #1 choice at the moment as I wouldn't have the potential Zen GEA issue and they are considerably cheaper than AAISP and you get to stay on BT Wholesale backhaul

[bogof]

Every now and then I think I'm mad, then I think that the GEA issue is the only problem I have with Zen. In selecting an alternative there has been a large compromise for all - cost if I want to be able to talk to someone that has half a clue what they're doing (AA), A naff call centre, or no static IP, or no IPv6 if I want to limit cost to similar to what I am paying. Annoyingly, GEA aside, Zen does seem to be the sweet spot for me.

I'll report back in 4-6 weeks   

You're a more tolerant person than me, but I think it's perhaps a doomed strategy.  Zen are able to offer less expensive but still personal service because of their own backhaul, and their stated goal is to get everyone migrated.  Your connection, regardless of promises, is going to be fighting the tide of their systems, and I can't see it but ending in frustration (assuming they don't manage to work out what's going on, which I doubt, as this has been going on for nearly 18 months across various customers).

Best of luck with it though.

[Jasonkruys]

You're a more tolerant person than me, but I think it's perhaps a doomed strategy.  Zen are able to offer less expensive but still personal service because of their own backhaul, and their stated goal is to get everyone migrated.  Your connection, regardless of promises, is going to be fighting the tide of their systems, and I can't see it but ending in frustration (assuming they don't manage to work out what's going on, which I doubt, as this has been going on for nearly 18 months across various customers).

Best of luck with it though.

I fear you.may be right, and I'll be hopping off the first sniff of any trouble in the future. Hopefully by that time I'll have worked out the next best option   

[Alex Atkin UK]

Maybe you will get lucky and CityFibre come along, if this IS an OR issue of some sort then hopefully CF connections are immune to the problem.  I'm not sure where Zen backhaul comes into the picture on the CF network.