Broadband ISP Zen Internet Offers Refurbished WiFi Repeaters
UK ISP Zen Internet recently announced that they’d begun making older “refurbished” versions of their EveryRoom mesh WiFi extender service and hardware (repeaters) available to broadband customers, which only cost £6 per month instead of the usual £9 per month for the new kit. Saving money and cutting electronic waste.
The EveryRoom service, which effectively acts as a guarantee of home WiFi coverage, first launched all the way back in 2019 (here) and made use of AVM’s Fritz! Repeater 3000 hardware to boost the wireless network signals. “A single repeater should be enough to guarantee connectivity in every room for most homes, but if you sign up and don’t get a stronger signal throughout your home we’ll send you another one for free,” says Zen.
However, over time customers have moved ISP or replaced their kit, which has left Zen with a spare pile of EveryRoom repeaters. But rather than scrap or auction off these otherwise working units, Zen has instead decided to make a special “refurbished” version of the EveryRoom service available to existing customers for £3 per month less than the usual price. Admittedly it’s older kit, so there’s no WiFi 6 capability, but not everybody needs that.
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The catch being that Zen are only making this available to take until 21st July 2023 (here) and a 12-month contract term applies.
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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are zen struggling, renting out office space, selling IPv4 addresses, flogging old repeaters for a few quid? hard times.
They’re renting the kit, not selling it.
Selling IP addresses is a great move for providers like Zen. They have way more than they could ever possibly need and a /24 is 4 figures. Unless they’re going to do an A&A and hand out /26s to whomever wants them they’re all good to profit. Newer ISPs need the address and will pay handsomely.
No idea about the office space but none of those indicate they’re in financial difficulties. They may have just gotten pragmatic about how many subscribers they are ever likely to get and realised they don’t need all the space, both IP and physical, that they’ve acquired.
Zen: make an objectively positive business decision
Internet expert: they must be struggling
No they are renting out office space because since the pandemic they have embraced home working and now only 20% of workers are in the office at any one time so they now have plenty of spare office space. Plus it makes sense to reuse returned equipment where possible. It’s called maximising your assets plus it’s more environmentally friendly, something Richard Tang is very keen on.
How boring Zen Internet are! Always backward!
Stick with Virgin Media or TalkTalk then.
Then don’t use them. Everyone’s happy.
what is this thing about charging rental for mesh or extenders? I have a TP-link router and can get a mesh extender for around £30, 5 months and you start saving money, if Wi-Fi 6 is required then around £50. Bt charge a fair bit for their mesh per month and even if you buy them outright they are a silly price.
Maybe they are pushing them to the non-tech person or the gullible ones.
The provider i use have some sort of mesh system, that they charge a monthly fee for, not that they said anything about it to me when I had mine installed.
True, but can be quite an attractive offer to techno-phobes, or those who could DIY but CBA and aren’t worried about the value. The regulars of this or any other tech forum will not be the target market.
At least with Zen any customer issues will likely get decent support, if you take the equivalent VM,TT et al offer then it’ll cost as much but any hopes for competent support may be misplaced.
Apparently the yoof of today rent everything and buy nothing. They even rent their music. Bonkers to you and me but hey if that’s what they want to do…
When they say refurbished, how deep do you think the testing is before sending them back out?
the cost of cleaning, config wiping, testing, repackaging and posting them out has to be close to the £72 a year they will get paid back? (plus ongoing support costs)
VM have been issuing recyled hubs for decades, and the “refurbishment” appeared to be a hard reset, no testing, wiping it with a greasy rag and putting it in a new box.
But for all ISPs who issue CPE, the costs of re-use need to be netted off against the fact that they’re legally obliged to take them back and dispose of to a licenced recycling facility, so there’s not a zero cost option, and the costs can be offset against corporation tax. Logistics under contract isn’t expensive (perhaps half the amount you or I would pay the likes of Hermes), so a couple of quid to send out each one…..I’d be confident ISPs do the sums on things like this, and they will be making quite a tidy sum, especially if the kit is “expensed” when first issued, and there’s no depreciation when reused.
I don’t think it’s a bad idea. Not a product/service I need whether rented or bought but I like the idea of reusing the older equipment if it works just fine