I hope that there might be some additinal words from Zen on Monday.
I also believe that Zen don't lock their modems and might deprecate those that do !
There is a minor change from Thompson's standard as Zen 585V7s have firmware that displays the Zen logo.
I believe Zen's current 585V7 price is £50.00. I also know on one occasion that they replaced a modem supplied by them FOC on a next day delivery.
Their "Vanilla" modems come preset with all the ADSL settings and includes a very simple wizard that asks for your modem user-name in the form zen123456@zen and your modem password which is a string containing numbers, upper and lower case letters. If you buy their VOIP modem it come completly configured.
Taking the liberty of quoting azzaka he suggests the 585V7 and Broadcom chip-set is more stable on long and noisy lines but on long and "silent" lines the 2Wire or netgear AR7 chipset modems can slightly out-perform them. I have proved this to be so in at least one case which is covered here, and is just about to be updated hopefully for the last time:-
http://forum.kitz.co.uk/index.php?topic=4730.0I can also confirm that Zen have no objection to offering set up advice on Netgear modems.
However if I know I'm installing a long line which could be problematical I like the additional comfort of using Zen supplied equipment.
(I also choose Zen every time around Ewhurst if I have the opportuinty for the same reasons.)
Kind regards,
Walter