Broadband ISP Zen Internet Hails UK Demand Surge for its Fibre Hub
A year has now passed since Rochdale-based UK broadband ISP Zen Internet launched its ‘Fibre Hub’ – a platform that essentially aggregates access to a number of full fibre networks, while offering that up to their partners (e.g. other ISPs) at the wholesale level. Zen now says they’ve seen a 52% increase in monthly gross demand through The Fibre Hub over the past 12 months.
Zen states that this growth reflects increasing partner adoption of full fibre services, as coverage continues to expand across the UK and the number of broadband networks they cover increases. For example, the Fibre Hub now offers access to full fibre lines from CityFibre, Trooli, Freedom Fibre (we assume this now includes Truespeed), ITS Technology, MS3 (they’ve only just gone live) and Openreach.
The provider also announced a forthcoming ‘Simple Switch‘ capability, which they say will allow partners to migrate customers onto any of their infrastructure providers without changing PPP credentials, replacing routers or requiring engineer visits. The goal is to help accelerate migration from older copper to full fibre lines and reduce operational barriers.
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Paul North, Director of Partner at Zen Internet, said:
“The opportunity in the market is clear, but what matters now is how quickly we act on it.
We’re seeing strong growth from partners who are leaning into full fibre, but there is still a significant base of end-users yet to migrate.
Our focus is on making that easier from simplifying access to networks and removing friction from migration, to giving partners the tools and insight they need to identify and win those opportunities.”
At the same time Zen said it would continue to invest in its network and platform to support increasing demand for higher bandwidth services. This includes upgrades to core, peering and transit, and backhaul capacity as well as work with its Broadband Network Gateway (BNG) and Customer Premises Equipment vendors.
Zen have also recently restructured their Network Operations Centre (NOC) and is busy transitioning its cloud platform from VMware to OpenStack, ensuring its partners have access to a platform that is not impacted following recent changes at VMware.
Finally, Zen confirmed they would continue to expand The Fibre Hub and its partner programme over the coming year, with further network integrations (i.e. the addition of more alternative networks) and platform developments being planned.
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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>> onto any of their infrastructure providers without changing PPP credentials, replacing routers or requiring engineer visits. The goal is to help accelerate migration from older copper to full fibre lines and reduce operational barriers.
I read this a few times but I can’t work out what it means. How can there not be an engineer visit to either switch infrastructure provider or switch a customer from copper to full fibre?
This is about Layer 3 wholesale switching. A Zen partner could move their connections from one wholesaler to another — say PXC to Zen – without any changes at the customer end. That works whether the underlying network stays the same (e.g. PXC CityFibre to Zen CityFibre) or changes (e.g. Openreach to Freedom Fibre).
As far as I’ve seen, every other wholesaler offering this kind of switch limits it to Openreach only.
The usual caveat applies: if you’re moving to a different network or technology, an engineer from the new network will normally still need to install. But the partner themselves wouldn’t need to send their own engineers or make any router changes. Ths is often a barrier when switching wholesale networks. It’s primarily designed for migrating whole estates of broadband connections between wholesalers.
Ah that makes more sense. Thanks for the explanation Neil!
@john_r: Zen’s fibre hub acts as a front end to multiple partners’ wholesale fibre networks, hiding their complexities so that a single suite of application programming interfaces (APIs) is exposed for the range of services, e.g. product, ordering, provisioning, etc, and translating a standardised API request into whatever each underlying network requires. These APIs are almost certainly JSON-based and thus available on a wide range of programming languages. (Wish I’d had JSON in my Java coding days, but that’s another story.)
As for this “Simple Switch”: the hub does not connect to a partner’s physical layer, rather it’s a connection to an intermediate layer (known as a ‘service abstraction layer’) which in turn maps onto the physical layer. So, if the customer switches ISPs who are both using Openreach FTTP, the complexity is hidden from the customer as the hub handles the changes at the service abstraction layer. This is how PPP credentials (or equivalent session identity, depending on the access model) can remain unchanged. And so long as the customer session (PPP/IP) stays the same, the router doesn’t need to change because it only interacts with Zen’s edge/service layer (e.g. BNG), not the underlying physical fibre network. Note that more work would be needed to change networks, e.g. Openreach to CityFibre.
Presumably it means partners can pay Zen to manage those things for them. Rather than those things not being needed at all.
How do they manage DHCP customers?