The drive to full fibre adoption and the need for speed!

More than 50 per cent of the UK now has access to full fibre broadband with Openreach delivering 800,000 new premises a quarter. At that build level, our CEO Richard Tang asks at this year’s annual partner event, can that pace deliver on the government’s manifesto to deliver nationwide gigabit-broadband by 2025 (since revised to a minimum of 85%)?

Back to the numbers. Circa 11.9 million premises are now covered with gigabit broadband of which 3.9 million are FTTP, with take up on the Openreach network sitting at about 33 per cent.   

The annual partner event focused on these figures and what they mean to the channel. Our MD for our Partner Division Stephen Warburton reminded partners of the importance of migrating their customer bases away from the soon to be redundant copper network. Rewind back a few years and there were 14.5m premises to migrate. Today that figure is down to about 9.5m to migrate, with an industry wide pace of about 80,000 a week. Steve said, “We’re on the right trajectory, but it’s not quite quick enough and we all have a role to play to ensure the milestones are reached.”

Here at Zen, of our customers that can access FTTP, there is 98 per cent adoption, a figure we are understandably happy with as we take a fibre-first approach to business. Similarly, Stephen mentioned that 60 per cent of our monthly orders are for FTTP something we would like to see replicated across our partners’ bases.

The need for speed!

At Zen we are already seeing demand for bandwidth, with new traffic peaks reached every year, with live sport, and particularly gaming, driving demand. Of our FTTP orders, 70 per cent are for products and services that deliver 300Mb or more. With appetite clearly there in the market, there are developments afoot for FTTP speed profiles of 1.2 and 1.8Gb speeds in the pipeline for next year.

Another key focus area is a drive for Ethernet, which is evident with our recent 10 per cent price reductions. Looking to 2024, we are keen to emphasise that investing in our Ethernet capability for our channel partners is a top priority.

Speaking at the event Richard Tang commented, “We are planning an end-to-end refresh of our whole ethernet journey to improve market opportunity for our partners, and it will also improve the customer experience for their end users – because our partners will be able to do everything directly, including getting supplier updates. This will all be done with a focus on maintaining our reputation for customer excellence which will always be core to Zen.”

This has admittedly been a source of frustration for our partners in recent years alongside the perceived slow delivery of 4G back-up. We did not shy away from these topics at our annual partner event, recognising that the delivery of 4G back up has not moved as fast as we would like and we do  acknowledge the need to go faster in delivering the proposition and making it available to our partner base.

Richard added, “We need to be on the front foot with all our products and service offerings, continually innovating, developing and improving. I want our people, and business, to be known as ambitious and entrepreneurial – I want Zen to maximise its opportunity in the market with a ‘just get it done’ attitude. We need to be quicker at finding a way around the difficulties and roadblocks and I believe this can be done with the right mindset.” Does this mean 4G back up is on the cards for Zen Partners in 2024? Time will tell.

What was also really clear at the event was the alignment between our technology and portfolio roadmaps, with our technology director John Lyons reiterating the drive to deliver the best ethernet experience for partners, liking it to our current broadband experience which is a well-oiled machine.

John rounded this year’s event off encouraging our partners to work with our technology team so we can understand their needs and help them deliver their vision. He said: “We want to work in partnership with you proactively so we can build that relationship and trust. We have loads of people on the team that want to talk to our partners – the people in our network operation centre, our cloud team, our voice experts,” making a nod to the spirit of partnership that Zen has developed within the channel.