Broadband ISP Zen Internet has confirmed that they’ve this week begun to soft launch a new range of packages based off Openreach’s latest 550Mbps (75Mbps upload) and 1000Mbps (115Mbps upload) consumer Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) tiers, although you won’t see them on their website for another week or two.
The new tiers officially launched at wholesale on 23rd March 2020, although Openreach’s decision to pause new FTTP orders due to the COVID-19 crisis (and associated lockdown measures) ultimately resulted in a few ISPs delaying their own launch plans. Nevertheless, a number of providers have now introduced related packages (here) and Zen are the latest on that list.
NOTE: Openreach’s FTTP network covers 2.75 million UK premises, which will rise to 4.5 million by March 2021 and then 20 million by the mid to late 2020s (2025-30).
We first became aware of this after some of Zen’s existing customers found they could now upgrade their FTTP plan to the 500Mbps and 900Mbps+ (average speed) tiers. At the time of writing the full package details aren’t yet available on their website (you can call to ask), but one of those who subscribed said that the top 900Mbps plan will cost £70 per month (it’s possible this may be a special discount rate, we don’t know yet).
One thing to be mindful of here is that Zen often only offers their best prices in areas where they’ve been able to unbundled the local exchange from BT, which reflects most of the UK but there may be some patches where it’s not yet available via their platform.
