ZEN INTERNET has announced a multi-million pound partnership with Chinese networking giant Huawei to roll out a new Next Generation Network across the UK.
Announcing the news at Zen’s annual partner conference at the Ham Yard 10 pin bowling hotel in London on November 24th, CEO Richard Tang told Zen resellers and dealers: "This continues our journey from an ISP to a carrier. This is great news for the channel and great news for the industry.\"
Named Project Plexus, Zen’s major network investment will see its number of Points of Presence (PoPs) in BT exchanges rise from 270 to over 400 in the next few months, and expand Zen’s robust, cost-effective on-net reach to well over 500,000 postcodes, covering nearly every corner of the UK.
Jon Bauer, Zen’s Technical Director for Network and Infrastructure, said: "We chose Huawei because it has a wealth of experience in building networks and offers the right technology to match our ambitions. With Huawei we’re creating a carrier-grade network that will, for channel partners, mean a more dynamic and flexible portfolio of products and services, alongside even greater resilience and performance.\"
"For channel partners it means a network that will, with Huawei equipment at its core, make their businesses more competitive now and in the future. It means we will be able to grow capacity more cheaply and quickly than our competitors, adding extra services and emerging technologies to our portfolio whenever the demand arises. In the short term it will mean major performance efficiencies, much better fault tolerance and more cost-effective solutions.\"
Included among those channel services will be: hosted VoIP in partnership with Vanilla IP (giving resellers the chance to rebrand the Uboss management platform); 500Mbps and 1Gbps Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC); G.fast (ultra-fast broadband over copper from the cabinet) from Jan 17; a 25-day turnaround service for wireless IGb wireless Ethernet in association with Metronet; traditional calls and lines alongside connectivity and provisioning management specialist Imperatives; 100mg Ethernet in London covering 20,000 postcodes(which Zen claims will be 35% cheaper than alternative); and a 3G mobile broadband back up service.
Ready to roll: Picture shows (left to right) Steve Warburton, Zen
Managing Director Channel Partners; Zen CEO Richard Tang; and
Shiweiliang, UK Managing Director Huawei - Photo supplied by Simon Wright Photography