I should have done this months ago, but I've finally swapped over to Zen.
For some reason, I wasn't expecting the connection to start for a few more days - I had it in my mind that I'd arranged it to swap over on the last day of the billing month with Plusnet (which would have been later this week). So, when I woke up to no internet this morning, I was a little shocked.
A quick check on my home router - yup, my Plusnet credentials don't appear to be working any more. That's either a great sign (Zen's got my line swapped over) or a terrible one (Plusnet have disconnected me and I've got a week of sitting on my hands!)
Still, the Fritzbox router was sitting there, ready to plug in - so, away we go!
A little bit of danging wire work, disconnected my main router (a now aging Asus RT-AC68U), plopped in the Fritzbox, turned everything on, and (as the documentation suggested) made a cup of coffee and waited.
2 minutes later, and I've got wifi, and through that, internet. Rejoice!
The next step is to get my old router set up with new credentials - I've got a decade's worth of router setup (DHCP addresses, port forwarding, etc) that I'd prefer to just keep as-is for now. Unfortunately, I don't appear to have a valid account as far as the Zen website is concerned - yet. I'm sure it'll propagate at some point today, but I can't yet find my DSL credentials (I know where to look, the button's just not there yet).
Luckily, my Asus router has a "dual WAN failover" mode which lets you nominate a LAN port as a backup internet connection - and after plugging that into the Zen router, it just automatically works. Second rejoice of the day!
One quick check of the weather on Alexa later, and we're up and running as though nothing has changed.
Speedtests are showing that the speed is at the bottom of the range I'd like to see (hovering around 50/15) - hopefully that'll train up over the next week.
So far, then, so good - internet works, I'm assuming the phone works but if not, no problem (I mean, who uses the landline these days anyway?) and my existing setup seems happy. And it's cheaper. And I'm not locked into a multi-year contract. And it's Zen - who (from previous experience, and lots of research) actually give a damn about customer service and quality of care.
