I used XLN for a few years and I had awful experience. The staff were all lovely but they made an aweful lot of mistakes which cost me money. Some of them don’t understand enough about the advice that they give. I moved a couple of times during the time that I was with them, and each time I was misadvised which cost me money, On one occasion I was taken off an all inclusive package and put on a pay as you go which sent my bills up from £60 per month to £240! And I never got a refund.
I had two failures of my phone and broadband during the time I had with them. I spent hours on my mobile being talked through the simple checks I had already done, before being asked to send a photo of the cables to prove that my router was plugged in, I didn’t mind the first time - but EACH time I called about the same problem, the operator would put me through the same dance. it was impossible to get them to call an engineer, they just said that everything was fine at their end so it must be my equipment. At least with BT they decide quickly to send an engineer and tell you you’ll be liable for the bill if it’s not an infrastructure issue.
After 3 days of no service during which they failed to book an engineer visit or even offer me a dongle, I found a private telephone engineer which cost me £300 call out. He diagnosed a problem with the infrastructure, nothing to do with me. When he called XLN to say that they needed to get an engineer to sort the issue - they made him do the same checks including sending a photo of the cables to prove my router was plugged in. He told them repeatedly that as a former BT engineer he knew (and had already done) the simple checks they asked him to do - and these checks took him over an hour tying up my phone line!
They then refused to call an engineer - just saying that it would be reviewed and they couldn’t promise. So the engineer, with my permission, installed a new master socket to see if the old one was affected by damp. It took quite some time as he had to bring the wires up from the basement. It still didn’t work. 24 hours later, by magic, suddenly everything worked. no apology. There’d been a BT engineer working at the exchange box up the street, so of course I believed it had been an infrastructure problem and I’d spent £££’s and lost £££’s in my time and missed calls etc for a problem that XLN failed to action for the best part of a week.
a few months later it happened again. My engineer came back and said that he had never ever had a client have two outages within a year and that in itself pointed to a problem in an exchange. XLN didn’t seem to agree and wouldn’t book an engineer. In the end I fitted a booster and a superior router which cost an eye watering amount.
it was very frustrating and I came to the conclusion that they just didn’t understand that my internet is business critical and so is my time. While Im grubbing around on the floor switching cables into different ports and rebooting my computer - I can’t earn. I really don’t care about the risk of having to pay for a potentially wasted engineer visit, I need to be able to work - not play diy technician for the day.
I couldn’t sleep for worrying it would happen again. (We routinely had issues with our card machine not working due to weak signal) I had to have 2 card machines using different connections in the end, just as back up!
So I moved to Zen and installed fibre. Which also cost a fortune- but I’ve never had a problem since. The switch over with zen was smooth and professional. There were no miscommunications. There have been no billing errors. There have been no faults. Cancelling my service with XLN was a nightmare. Constant dramas. But I got free in the end.
What I didn’t know was that XLN were using Talk Talk infrastructure and at the time, it was notoriously poor. The problem with telecoms companies that are selling a service they don’t provide is that if things go wrong, not only is there very little they can do, they also don’t really know what’s going on. They have to go to their provider who has its own clients who take priority. If there is an infrastructure problem, they’re not at the front of the queue when it comes to service - they have to wait their turn.