I want to switch providers but this forum is giving me second thoughts

Hello,

I’m currently with another provider on CityFibres network and I’m thinking about switching.
But there are a tremendous ammount on posts on this forum of issues, repeated issues, GEO IP faff.

Is it actually worth it to consider it a viable move?

Also is anyone able to show some traceroutes to various sites to show what the network is actually doing?
Seems to be next to none peering so how is this effecting peoples ping’s for gaming?

TIA

Outside of the GEO Location issues & Outages everything is fine.

Network appears fine for the moment, routing and such appears to mirror a Open Reach FTTP line so no complaints here.

That said I suspect the majority of the posts on this forum comes from users messing with settings and expecting 2.5Gbe speeds over wifi and such.

Expectation vs reality. Highly recommend giving it a try on a 1 month contract and if it doesnt do what your after dump it and move on to a bigger more stable (and likely more expensive ISP)

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I’m going to give you a completely honest answer here
If you want cheap ultra fast broadband then yes join up, you do get what you pay for.
Issues… well as you have mentioned, yes there are issues such as geo location and the odd drop out here and there, dynamic IP’s when the should be static.
Customer support can be slow but they’re a relatively small team so understandable at times,
In terms of ping for gaming, I’ve no complaints with that, various games I average about 5-20ms but that’s uk servers can be 30-80 on others
Edit- on a cityfibre FTTP connection

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I agree with @Steveburn my only frustration with Yayzi is the clunky slow responses from support. I stumbled across the forums via reddit. It shouldn’t be like this. There needs to be some investment in a contact number and support staff. I truly hope that arrives soon! But for the money it is quick broadband.

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Just think yourself lucky Yayzi has a forum, many other providers don’t! I can guarantee if they did, it would look similar to this, look at the VM one and it’s far worse than this one. Myself, I applaud Yayzi for allowing a forum and its openness. I can guarantee all ISP’s have their own issues, it’s just you don’t see them until you’re in there in the thick of the issues.

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Personally I like the fact that the support isn’t outsourced and you’re dealing with people who are invested in the product. I’ve wanted to leave a few times to be honest but then I remember the issues I had that made me switch in the first place.

Even now my family are unable to use the streaming apps that they use the most since being assigned new IP addresses a couple of weeks ago. This has caused Tantrums/arguments/issues and is not ideal at all. I know things are getting sorted and I’m trying to be as patient as possible but if you can wait until the geolocation situation is resolved I think it’s a worthwhile service and at the very least worth considering.

The main issues with CF tend to be install related, assuming you don’t need a new ONT, it should be a simple process. The next issue tends to be the ISP, lets be honest, March wasn’t a great month for Yayzi, migrations were being done in batches and in the middle of that the old transit provider went down and 40% of its users were off for 38hrs upwards. No getting around it, that wasn’t fun. Moving network resulted in new ranges, those IP ranges came with the need to update the geo-location data and each database takes as long as it wants to push updates, and much like DNS, those updates take time to propagate to content and service providers, but it’s a one off process. The other issue is static IP’s haven’t been static for many, for some thats a pita, for others it’s unimportant, but it should be resolved today from what has been posted.

So what about speeds? Well I can saturate my full profile speed easily whenever I like as long as the remote server is capable. Latency is reasonable for fibre (thats better than DOCSIS etc. but not the low single digits you may hope for, but those down south do seemingly get low single digits - its been said that a Manchester presence is on the roadmap to be brought online which may help with that. Routing and peering seems reasonable and issues are investigated.

Support is either via email/ticket, community based forum or whatsapp. Does this work OK? Pretty much, but it will reach a point where it doesn’t scale anymore ‘as is’. That said if any ISP with a phone line has an outage, good luck getting through. CityFibre also aren’t the best at communicating planned works, we had a brief outage that affected all? CF ISP’s a few days back. That said you are getting personal support from an actual human, likely the same human on an ongoing basis, normally thats rare/expensive. Downside is - as I understand it at present - effectively a single point of failure. That said Aquiss runs with a low head count and the support is also first rate, similar with A&A who have a relatively low head count, if asking something Liam doesn’t know, sometimes you don’t get an answer quickly or at all.

Billing is fine as long as nothing goes wrong, if it does, the manual intervention, the result is often not as intended. Eg I had a bill generated and the invoice cancelled after install issues - that weren’t Yayzi’s fault - I was assured the money wouldn’t take, but it still went. It wasn’t an issue for me personally, but that could have made a mess of someones finances if they were on a tight budget.

So, is moving to Yayzi something I absolutely recommend? That depends on your needs and expectations. After working in the industry, I have seen worse and paid more for it, i’ve also seen better and paid even more for the privilege, the thing that I personally like is you can see things improving and the open and honest dialogue when things go wrong is appreciated. The price point is reasonable for what is on offer and Yayzi have promised no price rises for 3 years, so even out of contract unless there are repeats of the ‘38 hour incident’ I doubt i’d move, even if it meant a slightly faster package or saving a pound or two. If I absolutely had to rely on my connection for work or similar? Possibly less so at this stage, but I would be paying for a business service with a priority faults response, failover and guaranteed compensation in that case, not a residential service.

Hope this helps give a little context to some of the things you read, with other ISP’s you aren’t given an official forum to be able to discuss and raise issues. If you want specific ping times, you’re better off providing specific destinations/servers.

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I think its the fact it’s not their network is what is off putting.
The underlining network only has 40Gbps of Peering Capacity compared to say YouFibre with 320Gbps of capacity. It’s safe to presume that the Transits are only 10GB links too as you typically take bigger peering links than transit.

It’s also unclear how many other Altnets are using this platform.

All you need is 50-60 users pulling line speed and your going to end up with packet loss all over the place.

The Geo issue shouldn’t really be an issue other than Yayzi renting a cheaper US block when a UK one should of been rented. Also a working IPV6 deployment would work around that issue for most streaming providers.

I’m still on the fence :confused:

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So I can confirm we currently have 100Gbps backhaul, and the network does belong to us. Just not our AS number currently. We’re getting all that set up.

We’re expecting to double capacity by the end of the year, and set up a lot more peering too.

And I can 100% confirm that no one else uses our network, it’s all ours. Capacity is not an issue. We have several thousand customers and we’re growing by around 300+ a month

We’ll definitely share more details over the coming weeks of the network set up for anyone interested :slightly_smiling_face:

Also we only take RIPE addresses, except for one block that was an ARIN. We get our blocks directly from Cogent now :slightly_smiling_face: and we try and clean them well in advance to avoid any issues.

I hope that helps!

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This is good to see. By any chance are you in Telehouse/Equinix for your peering? Do you guys also plan on setting up a Speedtest server and possibly a Looking glass? You guys should (if not already) peer with Hurricane Electric.

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An on-network speedtest server has been confirmed as on the roadmap, looking glass is another good shout, but i’d respectfully suggest less likely to be used by the majority.

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Yeah like looking glass is 100% more aimed for techy people

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My two penn’orth. Support can sometimes be a little slow - you might need to send a reminder email. But those delays are never more than a couple of days, and even those delays tend to only be in stuff that’s not critical. Anything I’ve needed rapid support on has been very quickly dealt with. What is always clear is that you’re dealing with a person who genuinely cares about your problem and once they’re in touch, they keep going until whatever problem your facing is fixed
Compared to every other ISP I’ve been with - with the exception of IDNet who were also awesome - Yayzi is definitely the best in my experience.

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I second this opinion

It wasn’t Yayzi’s fault that I had issues with my CF install causing 3 weeks of Delays. The Yayzi team are a nice and understanding bunch of people.

I am sure they have non-tech heads who are on Yayzi, that take up most of their time… Yayzi have stated to myself that they spend most of their day chasing CF as CF will not update the end user directly on progress, but ironically are haopy to ask for a satisfaction survey when you go live, so why they can’t update the user via that same method is beyond me