Access is critical to empowering service provider success, according to Donal Hanrahan, Director of Strategy at Strategic Imperatives. Here he discusses his plans and priorities to ensure The Fibre Café, its cloud based, API-driven integration platform, continues to catalyse competition and drive positive outcomes.
Wed, 7/05/2025 - 14:50
Zen Internet reiterated its ambition to become the altnet aggregator of choice in the channel at its official launch for The Fibre Hub (7th May, The Gherkin, London).
Powered by Zen Partner, the platform now offers access to a full fibre footprint of nearly 20 million premises, with this number expected to grow to 22 million by year-end as more altnets are added.
It currently provides access to CityFibre’s 4.3 million premise footprint and will add Trooli’s 400,000 and Freedom Fibre’s 300,000 premise networks within the next three months.
CEO Richard Tang shared that Zen was working on interconnectivity with a fourth altnet and had a fifth almost ready to announce. He stated that Zen is in contact with almost all other providers.
“The aggregation journey starts today but there is plenty more to come,” he said. “We aim to offer the channel access to as many of the altnets building full fibre networks in the UK as possible.
“Even though there is huge change in the UK altnet space, and will continue to be through consolidation, we see a real window of opportunity to maximise on this in the next two to three years. We want to help the channel to capitalise on this.”
To help channel partners win business The Fibre Hub will offer collateral through its resource centre, and Zen will provide marketing funds for those with “killer ideas”. The launch includes several new features for The Fibre Hub, such as network migrations, a redesign of the hub (formerly known as Zen’s ICP Portal), and a bulk migration tool.
To evidence the popularity of altnets, Tang shared that 55% of orders through Zen in the last year were on CityFibre’s network, compared to 44% on Openreach, despite the size of their respective networks.
CityFibre’s CSO George Wareing added: “The ambition Zen has is critical. The entire industry has done a phenomenal job in putting infrastructure in place and yet this is still largely underutilised. The issue is access and so having an organisation with the know-how and drive to be a true aggregator is key.
“We are personally going to be putting all the lessons we have learnt about take-up into the Fibre Hub to make partners as disruptive as possible.”
