There is “huge” opportunity around full-fibre rollouts for partners, particularly those who specialise in the SMB segment, said Richard Tang, Founder and Chairman of Zen Internet.
The popularity of hybrid working has only highlighted the importance of full-fibre broadband for businesses and partners should be striking up conversations around this interest, Tang said.
“There’s a big opportunity for channel partners in replacing leased lines with business-grade full-fibre connections, there’s a big opportunity for Zen to do that as well,” he told UC Today.
“That particular opportunity is something that we can do really well because a lot of our bigger competitors have substantial bases of leased line connections into their customers and the last thing they want to do is attack that revenue stream by replacing it with something that’s a quarter of the cost”
“In terms of reliability, a leased line is a piece of glass in the ground, and full-fibre connection is also a piece of glass in the ground. So, it’s a real big opportunity for small businesses to save costs on their infrastructure and for partners to enable that same cost-saving with the faster bandwidth.”
Tang told UC Today that the telecom service provider has seen significantly increased demand for its services since the onset of the pandemic last year as people require more reliable internet connections to work from home.
The firm is investing heavily in its full-fibre offering, including upgrading and expanding its 450 telephone exchanges across the UK. Zen Internet also intends to unbundle 250 more exchanges to ensure 80 per cent of its full-fibre connections are on its own network.
“That’s the big play for us and that will allow us to not only be in full control of the service that we’re offering, but it’ll also allow us to achieve price points that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to achieve going through wholesalers,” he elaborated.
“[We want to] go from being a niche provider at a premium price to being more accessible to more people. We want to go from being a Rolls Royce to something more like a BMW – we’ve still got the quality, but we’ve got a wider reach”
Zen recently made changes to its senior leadership team as part of its five-year strategic plan to grow to a £200m-revenue company.
Tang anticipates that revenues will exceed £100m by the end of its fiscal 2022, two years into its five-year plan, but warned that economic challenges are always a threat to any financial target, citing the chip shortage as one such obstacle.
“We’ve been doing this for 26 years now, you’re in a continual state of upgrading,” he stated.
“But in terms of specific challenges, the chip shortage is hitting already; fortunately for Zen it’s had a limited impact so far. We’ve struggled a little bit to get some of our networking equipment for the telephone exchanges that we’ve unbundled, but, apart from that, we’ve been able to source consumer routers fine.
“However, talking to other people in the industry, we’ve potentially not seen the worst of the chip shortage yet and that could turn into a big issue if we can’t provide routers to our new customer, or if we can’t make upgrades to our network that are essential because of increased bandwidth usage. But that’s a threat to the industry as a whole, not just for Zen.”
