Zen Internet UK Reveals 900Mbps Broadband Price on Cityfibre

ISP Zen Internet, which late last year confirmed that would soon begin offering broadband services on part of Cityfibre’s new alternative UK Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network (here), has today revealed that they intend to charge just £40 per month for the top unlimited 900Mbps package.

At present Cityfibre is busy investing in a £4bn rollout programme for their new “full fibre” network (here and here), which currently aims to cover around 1 million premises by the end of 2021 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 (this may well depend upon how they define ‘substantially’).

Until recently Vodafone’s related Gigafast Broadband packages were the only way you could access this, although they’ve since been joined by TalkTalk, Giganet, Zen Internet and a number of other ISPs (here). We still don’t know precisely how much all of these will charge for their related packages and availability tends to differ between providers, which adds an additional layer of confusion for consumers.

Nevertheless, Zen’s original announcement stated that the first locations to get access to their new Cityfibre-based service would be in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Worthing during January 2021, with Ipswich and Leicester expected to follow later (plus more locations joining them later in 2021).

The good news is that Zen has now launched this for c.9,000 homes in Worthing and Adur as part of their new Cityfibre based Full Fibre 900 Plus package (the local rollout aims to reach almost every home and business in the area by 2023), which costs just £40 per month – this gives you symmetric speeds of 900Mbps, unlimited usage, a pledge not to change the price at the end of your contract, a 24-month term and an included router.

The one-off setup fee for this is normally £29.99, but Zen has made this free as part of a launch promotion for all orders made before 30th June 2021. By comparison the equivalent package on Openreach’s FTTP platform from Zen, which has slower uploads of 115Mbps, is £69.95 per month (plus £54.95 setup). But Openreach’s network does have much wider availability.

Interestingly, Zen’s Cityfibre package is actually £5 per month cheaper than Vodafone’s equivalent tier, although Vodafone has tried to avoid consumer confusion by pricing their Cityfibre and Openreach plans at the same level.