Zen Internet Sign Deal to Harness Freedom Fibre’s UK Broadband Network UPDATE
Rochdale-base broadband ISP Zen Internet has today signed yet another wholesale deal with an alternative full fibre network, which this time will enable them to sell faster internet packages to homes and businesses by harnessing Freedom Fibre‘s 10Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) network across the North West and West Midlands.
At present Freedom Fibre’s network can already cover 315,000 premises (that’s up only a little from 300k on 27th Mar 2024) across parts of Cheshire, Greater Manchester and Shropshire in England and North Wales. The operator previously aspired to cover 2 million UK premises and also holds the Government’s Project Gigabit contracts to cover 12,000 premises in rural parts of Shropshire (here), as well as 15,000 in Cheshire (here).
However, until recently Zen Internet were only able to harness FTTP lines from Openreach and CityFibre, although they recently started to expand their availability by joining Trooli’s network as an ISP partner (here) and today’s deal will give them access to a fourth network via Freedom Fibre. Suffice to say that Zen are steadily growing their reach.
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Nathan Vautier, Freedom Fibre CEO, said:
“We are really pleased to be working with Zen, a leading, award-winning ISP, as this allows us to deliver our high-quality network services to Zen customers and accelerate our growth plans. This is a very important partnership, based on a shared ambition to drive the adoption of futureproof connectivity and boost business productivity.”
Richard Tang, Zen Internet CEO, said:
“I’m super-excited about our new partnership with Freedom Fibre, which will allow Zen to expand its full fibre network reach to many more customers.
We are the UK’s oldest ISP that still exists in its original form and also the best, according to the IT professional readership of PC Pro, who have voted Zen the UK’s best broadband provider every year since 2004 – 20 years and counting. I’m looking forward to launching our services shortly through Freedom Fibre’s first-class fibre network.”
The catch with these things is that it can make it harder for retail ISPs to offer a simplified set of packages and prices, since what they charge and offer will often end up varying much more by location, which can in turn increase the problem of market complexity for consumers. But at this stage it’s hard to judge such things as we don’t yet know when Zen will be launching their Freedom Fibre based packages and prices.
UPDATE 5th Nov 2024 @ 1:21pm
Freedom Fibre has kindly informed us that Zen’s new packages should be “available early in the new year” and prices will be roughly the same as what they charge on the CityFibre side of their service (e.g. £40 per month for 900Mbps). Multi-gigabit speed packages will also be available from £55 (Full Fibre Max with a Pro 6) or £65 (Max 7).
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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This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who watches Richard’s YouTube channel. Wouldn’t be surprised to see Zen sign up with Netomnia-Brsk and MS3. I know Richard has been looking at the possibility of aggregating multiple altnets presumably into a single virtual wholesale network.
This is excellent news for me. I have been using Zen since moving from Surrey to Chester back in 2003. My exchange (Gt Mollington) is apparently within Lot17 for Cheshire, which should be built starting early 2025.
Mine too I think, @ Kelsall.
Well, I overlaid the orange blobs on the UK map with our postcode on openstreetmap, and I think we are included..
Any news on Zen’s 2 Gbps product which their website still says is launching 2 months ago? Perhaps on the back-burner while they focus on integrating new networks?
I pre-registered and they emailed me saying it was ready last month. I called them and placed my order, I’m on the Openreach network getting 1.62Gbps with and eero Max 7. My brother is with Zen but in CityFibre area, he’s been told Zen will be contacting pre-registered CityFibre area customers very soon. I was told they’ve not released online yet as they had an unexpectedly high number of customers pre-register.
Thanks Simon, that’s good information. I’m with CityFibre so I guess that’s why I haven’t heard anything yet. Would you mind sharing how much they are charging?
As I understand it the price starts from £55 but depends on the network and options you choose. I’m paying £65 which seems competitive against the similar EE package.
Hopefully we’ll see them join more AltNets soon. Personally I think F&W could do with a large player… 😉
They do have TalkTalk. I’m using Squirrel who are only small but been a great service so far.
Oh, do you have a link to be able to order TalkTalk via F&W? Thank you 🙂
Going to get complex in overbuilt areas.
What will they offer if say OR and FF are available to the same address? Which speeds / contention / symmetric etc. will be offered?
Will it depend whether a carrier has already fitted an ONT, or will you be able to request a different one?
Could also lead to people in the same street praising Zen an others cursing because of an outage, would be interesting to see the SLAs.
If it’s a choice between Openreach and CityFibre they go with CF as it’s much cheaper so they will go with the altnet by default. It will get interesting if they’re with 2 altnets which have overbuilt each other.
It’s not complicated to have a logic to sort the providers by cost. Whoever is cheapest takes priority when available