Full fibre brings fastest broadband speeds to Adur and Worthing from £40

Adur & Worthing became the very first location in the UK to unlock gigabit-speed broadband services via Zen over the CityFibre network at the beginning of the year.
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Published 29th Apr 2021, 10:15 BST
Updated 30th Apr 2021, 11:39 BST
Gigabit-speed broadband is available in Adur and WorthingGigabit-speed broadband is available in Adur and Worthing
Gigabit-speed broadband is available in Adur and Worthing

Recently, Paul Smith one of the first Zen customers to connect to this network, shared his experience from ordering the product through to installation and the speeds he is now getting.

The new service is already available across circa 9,000 homes in Worthing and initially costs £40 per month with free activation (usually £29.99) as a special launch offer from Zen. To see if the product is already live in your postcode, check here.

PAUL’S REVIEW

A speed-test resultA speed-test result
A speed-test result

The original review is available on Paul’s blog here.

In 2020 CityFibre started digging up parts of Worthing to install Fibre to the Premises (FTTP). They sell this wholesale to ISPs, similar to BT Openreach. The main difference for consumers, however, is CityFibre offer a symmetrical connection for residential and not just business customers, so around 900Mbps down and up.

The UK’s long obsession with asymmetrical lines with crippled upload speeds is coming to an end. In the age of people uploading to YouTube and other services, upload speed is important – it has always been important and it’s a shame we’ve had to endure poor upload speeds for so long.

In Worthing Zen was the natural choice and offers a static IPv4 address. Zen sell this as their ‘Full Fibre 900 Plus’ package, for £40 a month, offering an unlimited connection up to 900Mbps up and down. As this is only offered in a handful of locations at the moment this usually won’t show up in their normal web pages, if you know you have CityFibre in your area you can check here.

The Zen routerThe Zen router
The Zen router

We ordered in the first week of April, and by the second week we had the install completed. This involved digging up some brickwork across our front garden and running the line into the house. It took the engineers about two hours to complete and they’ve left the area looking how it was when they started.

Zen then supplied us with a Fritz!box 7530 router. This is actually a pretty full-featured router, it offers far more features than I can possibly go into here, and makes other routers look like Fisher Price toys in terms of functionality.

It’s probably safe to assume realistic speeds are probably 700-800Mbps and up* at peak times, but it can be difficult to gauge as many of the online speed tests may have other bottlenecks somewhere when we start approaching speeds this high.

*Obviously don’t expect these speeds on WiFi.

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH GIGABIT SPEEDS?

Download a 600MB HD TV show in five seconds; a 4GB HD movie in 38 seconds; a 60GB game in 9 minutes and 32 seconds and upload a large 1GB file in nine seconds.

For more information or to check if the product is available at your postcode, please click here.

Related topics:Paul Smith