Zen Internet to re-sell Trooli’s fibre network

Richard Tang, CEO of Zen Internet, has interviewed many key people on his YouTube channel and talked about the future alt-net scene both in terms of consolidation and wholesale platforms. Today he spoke to Andy Conbere, CEO of Trooli which has built around 370,000 premises* not only on the company’s plans, but also used the opportunity to announce that Trooli would become a new wholesale partner for Zen Internet, allowing the business to deliver its popular retail broadband services to customers over Trooli’s wholesale network. Many alt-nets are trying to develop wholesale channels, or in the case of CityFibre, works entirely on a wholesale basis, whilst others see their own retail offering as crucial to develop the market.

“We are delighted to be partnering with Zen, one of the largest retail ISPs in the UK, as our businesses are so well aligned. Our network is ready for service so this new partnership allows Zen Internet to expand its customer reach and quickly connect its customers to a high performing network.

Our teams are leaders in their field, very experienced at exceeding the needs of wholesale partners and this partnership is a significant step for Trooli’s wholesale business. Unlike many altnets we are continuing to build our network to areas of the UK that will benefit from it the most and are dedicated to the innovation required to provide access to the fastest and most reliable full fibre broadband.”

Andy Conibere, CEO, Trooli

“This is an exciting time for our industry as we are experiencing the last major infrastructure rollout of our generation. By joining forces with Trooli as a wholesale partner, we’re enabling access to high-quality broadband infrastructure for homes and businesses in previously underserved areas.

Trooli’s commitment to delivering essential infrastructure to rural and semi-rural regions is facilitating digital access to communities that would otherwise be left behind. Through this partnership we’re proud to offer our award-winning services as an attractive alternative, providing greater consumer choice for these premises.”

Richard Tang, CEO, Zen Internet

The interview with Andy Conibere covers his long history at BT (pre-Openreach), how his business Call Flow Solutions started delivering wireless services, and how the company was one of the pioneers of Passive Infrastructure Access (PIA), the technology many alt-nets use to deliver broadband services, and which he considers to be a fairly mature product now. He also covered his views on BDUK’s effectiveness.

Trooli say for the majority of their network, they are “the only game in town” meaning that there are no other Gigabit solutions in their coverage; we think this is true, but only just. This isn’t to say that Trooli’s wholesale service may not beat other alternatives such as Openreach whose products don’t quite stack up the same way (but note they did announce 1Gbps symmetric product would be coming soon).

On consolidation Andy believes there will be some consolidation ‘for shares’ before full buy-outs (for cash), and a few smaller operators struggling financially. However the struggle for investors is they would not crystallise a loss, so many are funding alt-nets whilst customer numbers improve to increase the value of companies. He believes that having retail partners like Zen on board will give Trooli an advantage over any networks which have over-built the same footprint, by increasing Trooli’s network usage.

* Our broadband report puts them at 421,000 which we suspect is the Axione Scotland footprint in Scotland which they acquired, although we’re trying to find out exactly.