Zen Internet appears to have quietly become one of the first ISPs to begin offering the new 150Mbps and 300Mbps “Full Fibre” FTTP ultrafast broadband tiers to residential consumers, which can be taken either with or without line rental and the pricing is pleasantly affordable.
Until very recently Zen had been one of the few UK ISPs to offer Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) services to homes (over Openreach’s network), although their previous residential packages were aligned with the top FTTC tiers and that meant they only offered a maximum advertised download speed of up to 76Mbps (19Mbps upload). Faster FTTP packages were available, albeit only to business users and those were much more expensive.
The good news, as spotted by one of our readers (thanks Narindo), is that Zen has quietly updated their range of FTTP packages for residential consumers by adopting the revamped 150Mbps and 300Mbps tiers (note: Openreach show these as 160/30Mbps and 330/50Mbps). The new tiers were introduced (here) in order to align with the forthcoming hybrid fibre G.fast service, which promotes the same performance levels.
As usual the new ‘Unlimited Full Fibre 3‘ and ‘Unlimited Full Fibre 4‘ packages include “truly unlimited” usage, a wireless router (FRITZ!Box 3490), a Static IP address and apply a 12 month contract term. Customers will also need to pay a one-off £55 activation fee. On top of that the additional price increase for including phone line rental is tiny (a WLR3 copper line alongside the fibre).
Unlimited Full Fibre 1
* Download speed up to 38Mbps
* Upload speed up to 9.5MbpsPRICE (Standalone): £35 per month for 12 months (£42 thereafter)
PRICE (+Line Rental): £36 per month for 12 months (£43.99 thereafter)Unlimited Full Fibre 2
* Download speed up to 76Mbps
* Upload speed up to 19MbpsPRICE (Standalone): £42 per month for 12 months (£45 thereafter)
PRICE (+Line Rental): £43.99 per month for 12 months (£46.99 thereafter)Unlimited Full Fibre 3
* Download speed up to 150Mbps
* Upload speed up to 30MbpsPRICE (Standalone): £50 per month
PRICE (+Line Rental): £52 per monthUnlimited Full Fibre 4
* Download speed up to 300Mbps
* Upload speed up to 50MbpsPRICE (Standalone): £75 per month
PRICE (+Line Rental): £76.99 per month
As you’d expect the big problem with FTTP on Openreach’s national UK telecoms network right now is the lack of coverage, which is also true of other “full fibre” providers. However the situation is improving and officially Openreach should have covered 500,000 premises by the end of October 2017 (it’s unclear if all of those are ready for service) and they aim to reach 2 million by the end of 2020.
Most of these deployments will be for new housing developments and businesses sites, although Openreach also aspires to develop a “large-scale” rollout plan that could reach 10 million premises by around 2025. However the plan for that is dependent upon a lot of complicated factors and as such it remains uncertain whether or not the operator will be able to find a solution (here).
In the meantime the above pricing is reasonably attractive and no doubt other ISPs will follow suit as the availability improves. We should stress that this pricing is only reflective of native FTTP deployments and has no relation to the more expensive FTTP on Demand (FoD) service, which is aimed more at business users and requires the end-user to help cover some of the build cost (here). Zen doesn’t offer FoD.
UPDATE 9:28am
Updated the line rental description above. It’s not FVA but rather a normal copper line that you get alongside the fibre.
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