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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).
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.