ISP Zen Internet Joins Cityfibre’s UK FTTP Broadband Network

Cityfibre has today announced that popular UK broadband provider Zen Internet has just become the latest ISP to join their growing national Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, complementing others like TalkTalk and Vodafone. Until now Zen has been focused on selling Openreach’s products to homes.

As most people know Cityfibre has a major £4bn investment programme (here and here), which currently aims to cover around 1 million premises by the end of 2021 with their gigabit-capable “full fibre” network and then 8 million across 100+ cities and towns (c.30% of the UK) – the latter target is expected to be “substantially completed” by the end of 2025.

The new network has already won significant ISP (wholesale) support from major residential focused providers like Vodafone and TalkTalk, as well as the odd smaller operator like Giganet. On top of that there’s also a slew of ISPs that sell their business connectivity solutions, but those represent a different side of the market.

Attracting support from established ISPs is often a key element of any alternative network’s future success, especially those with large-scale ambitions, and to that end it’s good to see that one of the market’s most reputable providers, Zen Internet, has today become the latest addition to Cityfibre’s platform. Zen will obviously continue to sell Openreach based products too (FTTC, FTTP, G.fast, Ethernet etc.), but they’re now diversifying.

The first locations set to enjoy access to Zen’s “competitively priced” 1Gbps services via Cityfibre will be Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Worthing, where the first customers are expected to go live in January 2021. Ipswich and Leicester will follow later in 2021 with further locations to be announced in due course.

Paul Stobart, CEO of Zen, said:

“Full fibre is set to be the backbone of the UK’s connectivity for years to come, so we’re excited to be able to offer a market-leading gigabit speed service to tens of thousands of new broadband customers over CityFibre’s network. We will also be offering this service through our network of 700 channel partners many of whom are operating in these cities, so they too can make the most of FTTP and the move to ultrafast.

More urgently, UK consumers need a service provider they can trust that offers a reliable and customer-first approach, and we’ve been delivering that for two and a half decades now, introducing industry-first initiatives such as our lifetime price guarantee. We’re eager to show what we can do for customers in these initial cities in a world where households are more dependent than ever before on broadband that connects them to the outside world – including school, work, family and friends. We look forward to further expansion as the partnership develops.”

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said:

“We are delighted to welcome Zen onto our networks, and to support their exciting Gigabit-speed home broadband service. Their strong reputation and award-winning services make them a perfect partner and we look forward to helping even more homes and businesses to take advantage of the huge benefits that full fibre has to offer.

With build or mobilisation already underway across 67 towns and cities, and plans to reach up to 8 million premises, CityFibre is fast creating a nationwide world-class wholesale full fibre platform for our current and future customers. In doing so, we are also playing our part in providing the UK with the digital infrastructure needed to support its economic recovery and long-term success.”

We should add that the new agreement will, alongside residential packages, also see Zen work with Cityfibre to develop a new wholesale business service across their network footprint, which we imagine is something that Zen would then be able to sell on to their various partners (inc. some other ISPs) in the industry.

At this point it’s worth highlighting just how much of a major change this will be for Zen. Adapting to a completely new infrastructure provider requires an awful lot of time and money in order to establish the necessary systems and processes. On the flip side it means that consumers covered by Cityfibre should soon gain access to an ISP that tends to have a much better reputation for service quality than the bigger alternatives.

We look forward to seeing what their first broadband packages will look like and how they’ll compare with those from Vodafone etc.