Zen Internet is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) based in Rochdale in Greater Manchester, England.

History

Founded in 1995 by Managing Director Richard Tang, Zen Internet was one of the first Internet Service Providers in the UK. Zen began by providing Internet access to schools and small businesses in the Rochdale area. It has since moved from 2 employees in 1995 to 209 at the start of 2006 and in 2004 achieved an annual turnover of £14.2 million along with a customer base of more than 77,000 broadband users nationwide.

Market position

Zen has always focused on the UK business market although it does have a large consumer broadband customer base.

Products

Zen have six main product areas:

Broadband

ADSL

SDSL

DSL Hardware

Security services

UTM Firewalls

Content Filtering

Domain & Hosting services

Shared Hosting (Windows & Linux)

Managed Hosting

Domain names

Co-Lo

Leased Lines

Access (Up to 2 Mbit/s)

Ethernet (2 Mbit/s - 1 Gbit/s)

Private WAN

Web Solutions

Web Site Design and Build

Search Engine Promotion

Intranet/Extranet Site Design and Build

Voice over IP

Zen Wholesale Voice

Technology

Powered by Redback, Foundry, Juniper and Cisco hardware the Zen core network spans over 5 POPs, two in their home town of Rochdale, Telecity in Manchester, Telehouse in London, and recently expanding into the US at TelX in New York connected via an STM-16 trans-Atlantic link provided by Hibernia Atlantic . A 6th POP is in development in Leeds.

They are a member of the major UK peering points including LINX, LONAP, ManNAP and in New York they are members of NYIIX and PAIX. In 2005 they unbundled the Rochdale exchange proceeded by the Bury, Oldham and Blackfriars exchanges in 2006 to give an LLU service to local residents and Businesses; they are also working with the BBC to give access to the BBC's multicast broadcasting trials .