Zen Internet Starts Selling Broadband via Freedom Fibre’s UK Network UPDATE
Rochdale-based UK broadband ISP Zen Internet has revealed that Freedom Fibre’s alternative full fibre (FTTP) network, which at the last update covered 315,000 premises in parts of England and North Wales (4th Nov 2024), is now live on their service and being sold to consumers after being almost fully integrated following last year’s wholesale deal (here).
Until recently Zen Internet was only able to harness FTTP lines from Openreach, CityFibre and Trooli, although they’ve been gradually expanding through new agreements with alternative networks and Freedom Fibre is the latest to join that club. Zen’s partners will also be able to access the service via their aggregated wholesale platform (The Fibre Hub).
Freedom Fibre’s network can be found in a number of locations across parts of Cheshire, Greater Manchester and Shropshire in England, as well as North Wales. But the operator’s network expansion has taken a hit after they recently dropped out of the £43m (state aid) Project Gigabit broadband roll-out contract for Cheshire (here) and announced redundancies (here), although they still retain the £24m North Shropshire build contract (here).
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Richard Tang, CEO of Zen Internet, said:
“Big milestone yesterday for Zen Internet’s partnership with Freedom Fibre. After great collaborative working, integration, and testing, we are now fully live with selling Zen’s award-winning full fibre broadband over Freedom Fibre’s network via our Consumer sales team. Over the coming weeks, we’ll launch in our Fibre Hub, so our channel partners can benefit from access to this new full fibre footprint at market-leading pricing. We’ll also launch shortly in our online order journey.
In addition to Consumer FTTP, we’ll also shortly launch Business FTTP, E/O FTTP, and EAD-equivalent over the Freedom Fibre network, giving us and our partners a full suite of B2B connectivity services.
Focus now is on ramping up volume!
Big thanks to the many people within both Zen and Freedom Fibre who have worked hard to get us to this point, on schedule.”
Just to translate this, it doesn’t yet appear as if those covered by Freedom Fibre’s network can order packages via Zen’s online availability checker and our own testing appears to confirm this (as above, this will change soon). But you should be able to phone them up to place an order.
As a result, we don’t know precisely what the packages and prices look like, but we have previously been told that it will be roughly the same as what they charge on the CityFibre side of their service.
UPDATE 8th July 2025
The Freedom Fibre network is now live on Zen’s website homepage availability checker (zen.co.uk) and via their online order journey.
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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 would have willingly supported Freedom Fibre’s rollout to Cheshire (Lot17), if only to remain with Zen as my broadband provider for over 20 years, but it seems that the government’s decision to increase Employers National Insurance and increase to basic wages scuppered that and Freedom Fibre cancelled the contract.
Richard indicated at his LINX address that they had virtually completed a deal with another altnet, so we can probably expect an announcement in the not to distant future.
Netomnia, I wonder? Their strong backend (50GPON, 400Gbps LINX ports, additional POPs in Wales and Manchester etc with decent routing), with Zen’s customer service on the frontend could be a nice little combo indeed.
Just checked as I can get freedom fibre and I can also now get Zen but they seem very expensive £50 a month for 900 and it’s not symmetrical. Yes it’s only a month contract instead of 24 but it seems very expensive compared to other altnets you can get on freedom so I’ll give it a miss for now.
“Just to translate this, it doesn’t yet appear as if those covered by Freedom Fibre’s network can order packages via Zen’s online availability checker”. What you are seeing are probably the Openreach rates which are higher. You have to phone for the Freedom Fibre rates which are likely to be similar to their CityFibre rates.
Still have to wonder if this includes the LilaConnect area or if that hasn’t been integrated yet.
Will this include the Zzoomm network as well now?
Zzoomm is being merged with FullFibre Ltd, which hasn’t yet confirmed a deal with Zen.