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.
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.