Britain's full-fibre alternative Richard Tang, Zen

Zen Internet CEO Richard Tang wants to bring Britain's disparate fibre networks together

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Britain’s full-fibre networks have become a patchwork quilt of more than 100 different providers. Zen Internet boss Richard Tang wants to do something about that.

As an ISP, striking wholesale deals with different fibre providers is a pain. Different contracts, different pricing, different APIs. So Tang wants Zen to become an “altnet aggregator”, connecting to several different altnets and then allowing channel partners or even rival ISPs access to all those different networks via Zen. One contract, one API, much less hassle.

The curious thing is that even Tang believes that the vast majority of these altnets won't be around in as little as five years' time. A predicted wave of consolidation will see the full-fibre market dwindle down to only a handful of different networks, Tang predicts. So why does he want to become their champion? We sat down with the Zen boss to find out.

PC Pro: Tell us more about your plans to become the altnet aggregator.

Richard Tang: This is something that’s been in the thinking for about a year, 18 months. We signed the [wholesale broadband] deal with CityFibre back in 2022, that’s going really well, but we'd not thought much of going beyond CityFibre. And then 12-18 months ago we were thinking the other altnets are making good progress. Is there an opportunity?

If you look at Zen today, we supply 215,000 broadband lines out of a UK total of something like 28-29 million. So that means we've got 0.7% of UK market share.

Let’s say we could expect 1% or 2% market share on CityFibre [because there's less competition - no BT Broadband, for instance]. Well, that means with 4 million circuits, we could expect maybe 40,000 circuits, up to 80,000 circuits on the current footprint. That’s a lot of circuits. That’s really worthwhile.