ISP Zen Internet’s Cityfibre FTTP Service Goes Live in Newcastle
Broadband ISP Zen Internet has confirmed that their new 900Mbps Full Fibre Plus package (£40 per month), which is based off Cityfibre’s UK Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network, has now also become available to homes and businesses in the city of Newcastle, at least it is to those covered by the new network.
Cityfibre’s consumer focused full fibre network was initially only being supported by launch partner Vodafone (Gigafast Broadband), but over the past year that has been expanded to include TalkTalk and many smaller providers (some of those have yet to launch their packages). Zen Internet announced that they’d joined this club last November (here), but like other ISPs their services weren’t, at the time, available in every one of CF’s covered town/cities.
So far Zen has made their new CF based gigabit class broadband package available to homes in Worthing (here) and, as previously planned, they’ve just extended this to the city of Newcastle. Assuming all goes to plan then we’d expect Ipswich and Leicester to go live in February 2021, with further locations to follow.
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Meanwhile Cityfibre are currently investing £4bn to cover around 1 million premises with their alternative FTTP network by the end of 2021 (500,000 have already completed), which will then rise to 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 (depending upon how they define ‘substantially’).
Going forward we don’t intend to cover all of these ISP specific location announcements as, with so many ISPs now joining Cityfibre’s network, it would quickly become far too repetitive to write about them all. Meanwhile the patch-work approach to different location coverage between ISPs may also risk creating more confusion for consumers.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I’m hoping barnsley is enabled soon after it goes live as I would rather go with them over vodafone when the current rollout goes live.
So much cheaper than Openreach offering
Well lets hope it remains working to a decent speed and standard when it becomes more subscribed.
Any idea where in Leicester they’re going live?
It’s live now pal, I’ve just signed up.
Archie- The first areas of Leicester ready to go live by end of Feb will be
Belgrave
St Matthews
Rushey Mead
Hamilton
Stadium Estate
Abbey Lane
NorthBridge
Frog Island
Gipsy Lane
Narborough Road (Only parts though )
Most of the city centre
Then bit later on probably May time as construction has only just started
Thurmaston
New Parks
Braunstone
Stocking Farm
Spinney Hill
Northfields
Dane Hills
West Cote
After that I understand that they also plan to cover
Beaumont Leys
Syston
Eyres Monsell
Wigston
Thorpe Astley
Rowley Fields
Highfields
So quite an extensive area when it is all finished with just a couple of notable omissions in Birstall in the North and Oadby in the South I am told this is due to the core network
Thank you for the information. Is there a source you’re able to link me to, please?
Birstall always suffers in this respect. Of all the villages along the A6 corridor it’s the only one that seems to miss out. Rothley, Barrow, Sileby, Sorrel and Quorn all the way to Loughborough seem to get a lot of good connectivity options.
Archie- The trouble that Birstall has had with Openreach is that a lack of previous investment at the Birstall exchange in previous years including a whole area of Greengate Lane estate circa 1000 houses not having FTTC . This area will now go straight to FTTP but is a big job to do as there is no aggregation point and the ducting is very old with most houses having overhead lines
This has meant that Virgin media have a very strong foothold in this area a simple Wi-fi scan shows how so many people are on VM which is obvious why would you have 18-20Mbps ADSL when you can have min 100Mbps VM connection for less money. The problem being VM cannot keep up with demand as their network was not built for such high usage hence why many people are restricted to having the lower speed tiers and even the top bundle is limited to 350Mbps which is often lower around the 200 mark
The CityFibre information was shared with me by them when I put in a request to them as I had quite a large home working project and needed to get an idea of the depth of their network before we could consider them. Not sure if it’s still online there was also a map published that showed the correct planned area of coverage but I know that has changed as that didn’t go out as far as Hamilton,Thurmaston and Northfields
Again, thanks for the info.
I’m sure Birstall has Virgin’s FTTP like much of Charnwood and Leicestershire as a whole as they have the snaking shallow trenching, grey cabs and ports outside of people’s houses that weren’t there before. Don’t get me wrong, being able to have a 600/40mbps connection is the epitome of ‘first world problems’ when you only have Virgin to choose from but if Zen are coming to the section of Leicestershire where I live then I’m very happy. My choice was either a intermittent 45/10mbps connection with an Openreach reseller or Virgin’s FTTP. The Virgin connection is solid as a rock, but comparatively to VDSL the ping is high, has a lot of jitter and is not on par with it being RFoG not as capable (at least in the short term) as what CityFibre are providing.
I don’t suppose you still have the files and would be kind enough to drop me a link, please? If not, no worries. Thank you.
Anyone heard anything about residential cityfibre connections in Glasgow?
For anyone interested, if you live in Newcastle and want to enquire about availablity the number Zen refered me to was: 01916919130 (this is still Zen)
As a heads up it looks like its only available in the Kenton Area at the moment. I’ve asked Zen if they know when other areas of newcastle are available. I have validated this with their online checker so if you do check online and it says its not available for you its not a bug with their checker. Its just your area isnt yet live in Newcastle.
Also, having checked their check its not £40 for 1GBps (not sure if typo in main article or not). The prices it showed me for a house in Kenton is:
£38.99 for 100mbps
£49.00 for 300mbps
£55.99 for 500mbps
£62.99 for 900mbps
I’ve heard back from Zen/Cityfiber and the east end area should be online by April.
I too saw those prices and raised an eyebrow. Found this link which shows the £40/month offer though. Not sure why the disparity… http://www.zen.co.uk/newcastle
Half of my street has been activated, but not mine. I called and they could only tell me that it would turned on before August…
These prices are for use if you go through Openreach as you will see its not synchronous only 100mbps upload and 900 download. Where for the connection through cityfibre its synchronous 900mbps upload and 900mbps download. going to the website zen.co.uk/newcastlefibre
My only concern is how well the network is laid down, being the first on will i have a lot of disconnects etc or loss of service.
Any idea when Wallsend will be activated? I can’t wait to get away from Virgin Media