Zen blames BT for 20 meg broadband delay

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 12 Jun 2009 at 13:55

Zen Internet claims a lack of BT engineers means it will take eight months to upgrade its customers to the new 20Mbits/sec broadband services.

The ISP has detailed its plans for the upgrade to BT's 21CN network, which will herald the introduction of ADSL2+ services.

However, the PC Pro award winning provider is warning that customers may not see their speeds increase until well into next year.

"When customers are moved to the new service, their line must be physically moved to different equipment at the BT exchange," Zen's website claims. "The rate at which customers can be moved is physically restricted by the number of BT engineers working within each local exchange."

"We currently estimate that, based on the expected numbers of BT engineers, it will take eight months to move those customers who are on 21CN enabled BT exchanges over to our 'up to 20Mbits/sec' broadband services."

BT, however, denies there's any shortage of engineers. "If Zen wanted to, it could move all 50,000 of its customers in a couple of months," a spokesman for BT told PC Pro. "It's not the case that there's not enough engineers. We're processing 90,000 [customers] a month."

Zen is also moderating expectations about the potential speed of ADSL2+. While the technology is theoretically capable of 24Mbits/sec, the ISP will join BT in marketing the service as "up to 20Mbits/sec".

Zen estimates the average download speed will be between 9Mbits/sec and 13Mbits/sec, largely depending on distance from the exchange. However, it claims some trialists have seen speeds in excess of 20Mbits/sec.

16 June update: Zen now claims there are three factors involved in the time it takes to migrate customers to ADSL2+: BT engineer resources, Zen's own engineer resources and the company's decision to carefully manage the migration to ensure a smooth customer experience.

"What caused the confusion was, in our communication to customers we only mentioned one of the factors [BT's engineers]," Andrew Saunders, Zen's head of product marketing told PC Pro.

The company has subsequently altered its customer information.